Caroline Hau, The “Cultural” and “Linguistic” Turns in the Writing of Philippine History, Part II A different position on the relation between “indigenous” and “foreign” categories of meaning is taken by Zeus Salazar, whose works contain the most elaborate and influential formulation of the theoretical underpinnings of the Pantayong Pananaw movement in historiography. There is not enough space in this essay for a sustained engagement with Salazar’s prolific work, so I will limit myself to drawing out the general points of Salazar’s argument.[53] Salazar’s version of the Great Divide, which he calls “Dambuhalang Pagkakahating Pangkalinangan,” is rooted in a critique of the use of “western-oriented” historical perspectives and methodologies in the writing of Philippine history. This orientation to the “foreign” (banyaga) is principally manifested in terms of the historians’ choice of language—the preference for writing in English—and in the writing stance taken by Filipino historians of speaking to the outside rather than to their own bayan. Salazar calls this view “pangkami” and contrasts it to the “pantayong pananaw” (“our view”, “pantayo” implying the inclusive first person plural form of “we”), which springs from the notion of a “kalinangang bayan” that is manifested in the characteristics, values, wisdom, knowledge, aspirations, customs, habits, actions and experiences of people speaking to each other within a single cultural/civilizational context.[54] Characterized as “bukal”, “tunay”, and “taal” (natural, true, and indigenous)[55], the civilization of the bayan is defined as a community-in-dialogue (nagsasauling-talastasan) that thinks and communicates in Philippine languages, and is defined and represented through Pilipino, the national language. The latter is important because local histories (pampook na kasaysayan) cannot be separated from the concept of the nation as a totality.[56] Moreover, kalingangang bayan is defined as an ethnic unity (kabuuang etniko) of the different ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines and the true basis of Philippine history.[57] A key idea in Salazar’s theory is his reframing of the Fichtean notion of the “natural” social bond created among people of a given collectivity on the basis of mutual intelligibility through shared language use. Concepts, ideas, and values should be understood by the people to whom these concepts, ideas, and values belong in the first place. Moreover, the concepts, ideas, and values themselves must come from the “inside”, as it were, rather than be treated as “objects” of study that are framed by “foreign” heuristic categories. The metaphor for language use employed by Salazar as the basis of his pantayong pananaw is the “closed circuit”. [58] Each ethno-linguistic group has its own pantayong pananaw, pieced together from “cultural and social elements” (elementong kultural at panlipunan) which can be shared (naipapamahagi) and understood (naiintindihan) by each of the members in that group.[59] The task of nationalist historiography is not just to tell the story of the formation of the nation through these various ethnolinguistic groups, but to do so through the use of the national language, Pilipino. Forging a pantayong pananaw on the national level through the promotion of the use of Pilipino as the national language and as a medium of instruction in Philippine schools is, therefore, an act of language that redraws internal borders and conceptually binds the ethnolinguistic groups into a single ethnic nation.[60] Although Salazar is attentive to the contributions of Ileto and Rafael toward a theorizing of colonial negotiation and the “indigenization” by the katutubo of “western” concepts,[61] he has also tended to argue at one and the same time that this negotiation is nothing more than uncritical “borrowing” of “western” concepts by the elite and takes place only on the level of elite-colonizer relations, to the general detriment of the colonized; the rest of the inhabitants—which is also the majority—remain in a culturally pristine if increasingly fragmented state, relatively unaffected by the “culture” brought in by the Spaniards.[62] While stating that translation was an important means by which the language and culture of the west were indigenized by the native population (and vice versa), he also condemns the elite for being irreparably contaminated by the culture of the colonizer: because the elite—including the ilustrados—were exposed to the West, becoming Spanish (or American) through their use of a borrowed tongue, and consequently losing touch with the rest of the population. Salazar’s contribution to Philippine historiography lies in his careful, detailed linguistic and ethnographic analyses of Filipino concepts. His analyses have pointed to semantic differences between Filipino words and their English translations as a way of arguing for a more critical use of “foreign” analytical categories. He has also provided new periodizations of Philippine history that give considerable attention to the pre-colonial past and to ethnic groups hitherto marginalized from “national” histories.[63] Equally provocative is his elaboration of a Southeast Asian, specifically Malayan, context in which to locate Filipino culture and history.[64] Given his arguments concerning the existence of a linguistic “divide” within the kalinangang bayan, the development of a pantayong pananaw is rendered all the more exigent because it is the crucial first step toward effecting a rapprochement between the people on each side of the Great Divide (dakilang pagkakawalay). Speaking of the semantic differences between the concepts of “nation” and “bansa”, and between “himagsikan” and “revolution”, Salazar writes: “Gayunpaman, sa harap ng pagkakahati ng kabuuan sa kalinangang atin at sa kultura ng iba, kailangang mabuo muli ang bayan, sana kasama ang ‘nasyon’ ng elit, tungo sa pagkabansa: ang bansag di nalalayo sa bayan, banua, ili ng dating kabihasnan.” (All the same, in the face of the cleavage between our culture as a whole and that of others, we need to unify the bayan again, hopefully to include the ‘nation’ of the elite, toward nationness: the [new] term not unconnected to bayan, banua, ili of the older civilization.)[65] There have been critiques of Pantayong Pananaw, mostly charging the group with ethnocentric chauvinism[66] and linguistic reductionism[67]. Ramon Guillermo’s critique persuasively reads Salazar’s rigid dichotomization of the categories “foreign” and “indigenous” against the grain of Salazar’s more nuanced arguments concerning native appropriation (pag-aangkin) in order to argue in favor of the mutual determination (sabayang pagtatalaban) of different cultures. Guillermo also traces Salazar’s blanket dismissiveness toward all “foreign” concepts (including Marxist tools for social analysis) to the latter’s failure to account for the internal heterogeneity and contradictions operating even within the most cohesive ethnolinguistic unit.[68] Part of the problem with some of Salazar’s pronouncements—including his wholesale dismissal of foreign theories and his distrust of the use of foreign language—lies in Salazar’s idealized notion of the transparency of native languages. It is true that his argument concerning the imperative of using language that can be understood by the many performs a necessary function in criticizing the academic stratification, created by English, that threatens to relegate history to the dustbins of irrelevance in the eyes of the majority of Filipinos. But Salazar’s critical attitude toward the power relations implied by the use of English does not extend to his analysis of the use of Philippine languages. While he rightly criticizes the exclusion of most Filipinos from gaining access to their own history, he fails to consider the fact that writing in Filipino may not be enough to guarantee that more people will read these historians’ works. To account for the latter, one would have to delve into the social contexts within which communication (or non-communication) is embedded. This would demand a thorough examination of the ways in which linguistic exchanges express and reproduce relations of power and social divisions, which are manifested through even seemingly negligible variations in accent, vocabulary, and intonation. Moreover, as Ileto and Salazar’s controversial involvement with the Tadhana project should make clear, historical research is not conducted in a social vacuum. Salazar has been quick to discount Marcos’s personal intervention in the Tadhana project. He claims that Marcos’ involvement in the project was confined to a few erroneous facts inserted into the text by Salazar as a way of humoring the nominal author. But the fact that Tadhana books carried Marcos’ byline raises thorny and compelling questions about the ethics of intellectual and artistic labor than cannot simply or neatly be swept under the rug of Salazar’s flippant downplaying of Marcos’ role in Tadhana or his even more facile denunciation of “authorship” as a Western concept.[69] Thus, the link between language and society cannot be theorized by treating linguistic analysis (and the intellectual who uses it) as a free-floating abstraction that stands in isolation from politics, history, and economics, that is, from the social and political conditions of language formation and use. A linguistic analysis cannot be thorough without a socio-historical analysis of the contexts not just of linguistic performance, but of the production and reception of texts. The absence of such a socio-historical perspective in Salazar’s theoretical argument is evident in his detailed linguistic analysis of the semantic differences between “himagsikan” and “rebolusyon”,[70] which only concerns itself with etymology, and does not tackle the “subsequent” careers of these two words through their more than one hundred years of circulation among Tagalog speakers. Etymological reduction has the disadvantage of imposing too rigid a distinction between “foreign” and “indigenous” words without being able to offer any credible account of the actual use of the terms themselves. Similarly, Salazar grounds the primacy and authenticity of the kalinangang bayan in the “natural” homogeneity of ethnolinguistic groups that are “native” to the Philippines. In his diagram illustrating the Great Divide in Philippine culture,[71] for example, he puts the Chinese and the Indians in a separate box that is clearly demarcated apart from the “native” ethnolinguistic groups. Such a division might seem commonsensical, but, like the illusion that language is homogeneous, such an assumption rests on an unexamined, mythical, and essentialized notion of ethnicity that draws selectively on too narrow a definition of the Tagalog word taal. Taal, after all, does not only mean “indigenous” but also refers to those who are born in the locality (regardless of their ethnicity) and, thus, to the idea of social location. The potential fascism of an ethnocentrism based on assumptions about the “natural” bond created by language, an ethnocentrism which can be and has been utilized by the Philippine state for the xenophobic suppression of minorities (including the very groups that are valorized as “authentic”), cannot be underestimated.[72] One example of an incoherence generated by ethnocentrism can be found in The Malayan Connection, in which Salazar develops his notion of Southeast Asia as a conceptual unity the boundaries of which extend all the way to Southern China, where most of the Chinese in the Philippines originated. He insists, though, that the intimate connection between Southern China and Southeast Asia is rooted in the distant, protohistorical past, before the downward migration of the “Sinicized” people from the North. This kind of purist notion of culture does not take into account the hybridity of Southern Chinese culture itself.[73] Nor does he consider the fact that the identity of the so-called “Chinese” in Southern China is relatively fluid and had never been fixedly Chinese (what counts as “Han” Chinese anyway?); moreover, in the case of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, “Chineseness” itself was actually mediated by the policies and classificatory schemes of the colonial and post-colonial states. Such nativist purism makes it all the more difficult to accept Salazar’s contention that the Chinese contribution (tarred by its “inauthenticity”) to the Philippine languages were contributions made by the Chinese “as Filipinos”[74], unless the term “as Filipinos” is taken to imply outright assimilation, which would quite literally have made any linguistic contribution impossible! Ramon Guillermo has advanced an alternative, more dynamic view of Philippine culture as a unity-in-contradiction (kabuuang-may-hidwaan), which is sensitive to the multifarious “levels” of interaction, exchange, and dialogue both within and between cultures inside the Philippines, and between the Philippines and the “outside”. Guillermo is also at pains to stress the fact that the cultural struggle is only one of many sites of struggle on which the oppressed must embark. Furthermore, the forging of a national culture cannot be accomplished on the level of theory alone, but through political movements and policies.[75] From the above critiques of Ileto and Pantayong Pananaw, we can derive several observations, which will serve as a conclusion of sorts to this essay: In using language as a model for thinking culture, we should be careful not to idealize the language community, let alone ignore the socio-historical conditions which determine the dominance of one kind of linguistic practice over another. This extends not only to “foreign” languages, but to Philippine languages. Filipinist perspectives must be commended for promoting the use of Philippine languages, but relations of difference and inequality operating within and among Philippine languages should be accorded the same attention given to the study of relations of inequality operating between Philippine languages and American English. This also means subjecting the “natural” link between language and culture to a more rigorous reappraisal and retheorizing. Moreover, we need to be aware of the problems that beset approaches to studying culture through language. Using language as a model for examining cultural, social, and political phenomena should not assume an unproblematically one-to-one correspondence between language and the cognitive forms through which we make sense of “culture” as such. Treating language as a structurally stable phenomenon is a heuristic decision and is perhaps unavoidable within the context of scholarly inquiry, but it should not be taken as an accurate representation of the reality of language use. Language use in the Philippines is not only characterized by the complex intersection and overlapping of different languages, but exhibits considerable internal dynamism and variation. Thus, although the issue of language is important in socio-cultural analysis, the fact that language is itself part of what is produced and reproduced as “culture” should serve to clarify that language is not “natural”. Equally important is the implication that linguistic and ideational changes cannot be properly studied by employing such commonsensical ideas as “influence”, “diffusion” or “spread”. At the very least, this calls for a more sophisticated theory of language and linguistic performance, and equally sophisticated explanations for the convergence of, or agreements among, different productions of (linguistic and conceptual) knowledge in different areas. Furthermore, the effectiveness of any linguistic performance (or enunciation, to use the linguistic jargon) is indissociable from forms of life other than the cultural. No linguistic analysis can be made without bringing in socio-political and economic analysis. The “uses” to which heuristic categories like “language” and “culture” have been put in order to advance certain arguments about an “ethnic”-based nation and the exclusion of “non-native” groups from the national body politic is ample proof enough that ideas that originate in philosophical, educational and scholarly sites can be employed in everyday contexts, with visible socio-political consequences in everyday life for the so-called non-natives. This, in turn, should make us more attentive to the role played by institutions and the division of labor in producing a class of people called “intellectuals”, many of whose works presume to speak to, and even on behalf of, “the masses”. Salazar’s idea that Pantayong Pananaw is a form of collective consciousness that does not require the signature of the author is, at best, wishful thinking on his part and, at worst, a dangerous disavowal of the intellectual’s moral accountability and responsibility for the political implications of his or her scholarly endeavors.[76] An argument can be made about the fact that it is precisely the specificity of a work—for example, Salazar’s writings—that enables us to discern the common, shared ideas of a particular group, because it is in these specific works that the ideas are articulated in a relatively coherent form. My decision to study Ileto, Rafael, and Salazar’s pathbreaking works proceeds from that assumption; I must add that the idea of using texts to analyze the social history of an idea is not a new insight in literary studies. Finally, looking into the structures of everyday life (to use Fernand Braudel’s term) and of “mass culture” may provide insights into the historicity of language and culture, and the different dimensions of history that constitute the “matrix” through which the particularity of Philippine historical experience is identified as “common” or “different” from the experience of other “cultures”. A theory of critical appropriation and negotiation, though, need not be encumbered by rigidly opposed or mutually exclusive categories like “foreign” and “indigenous”. At the same time, categories like “elite” and “masses” need to be subjected to rigorous conceptual investigation. One direct implication is that we need to give up our search for the “pure” or “authentic” Filipino just as we need to be critical of “Western-derived” cultural concepts. By problematizing analytical categories used in defining Filipino “culture”, rather simply taking them for granted, we take a step closer to understanding the real complexity of the Filipino people’s history. WORKS CITED Agoncillo, Teodoro A. Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan. Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 1956. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Second edition. Edited by Marina Sbisa and J.O. Urmsson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Bautista, Violeta V. “Ang Programang Doktorado ng DAPP: Kasaysayan at Kasalukuyang Katayuan.” In Pilipinolohiya: Kasaysayan, Pilosopiya, at Pananaliksik. Edited by Violeta V. Bautista and Rogelia Pe-Pua. Manila: Kalikasan Press, 1991. 23-36. Beardsworth, Richard. Derrida and the Political. London: Routledge, 1996. Casambre, Napoleon J. “Ang Pagsisimula ng Historiyograpikong Pilipino, 1900-1950.” In Pagbabalik sa Bayan: Mga Lektura sa Kasaysayan ng Historiyograpiya at Pagkabansang Pilipino. Edited by Ferdinand C. llanes. Manila: Rex Book Store, 1993. 19-41. Constantino, Renato. The Philippines: A Past Revisited. Quezon City: Tala Publishing, 1975. Cruz, Romeo. “Ang Paggawa ng Tadhana Mula 1980.” In Paksa, Paraan at Pananaw sa Kasaysayan: Ulat ng Unang Pambansang Kumperesnya sa Historiograpiyang Pilipino. Edited by Ma. Bernadette Abrera and Dedina A. Lapar. Quezon City: Department of History, University of the Philippines, 1992. 200-203. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated from the French by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Diokno, Ma. Serena I. “Philippine Historiography and the Challenge of New Paradigms.” Paper read at the Colloquium on indigenous Southeast Asian Historiography, 13th Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Tokyo, Japan, 5-9 September 1994. Eberhard, Wolfram. China’s Minorities: Yesterday and Today. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1982. Enriquez, Virgilio G. Pagbabangong-Dangal: Indigenous Psychology and Cultural Empowerment. Quezon City: Akademya ng Kultura at Sikolohiyang Pilipino, 1994. Faure, David. “The Lineage as a Cultural Invention: The Case of the Pearl River Delta,” Modern China 15 (1989): 4-36. Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. London: Verso, 1978. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Addresses to the German Nation. Translated from the German by F.F. Jones and G.H. Turnball. Chicago: Open Court, 1922. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Second revised edition. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1998. Gasché, Rodolphe. Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Guerrero, Milagros C. “Understanding Philippine Revolutionary Mentality.” Philippine Studies 29 (1981): 240-256. Guillermo, Ramon G. “Pook at Paninindigan sa Pagpapakahulugan: Pag-uugat ng Talastasang Sosyalista sa Kalinangang Bayan.” M.A. thesis, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, Philippines,1999. Hau, Caroline S. “Histories and Texts.” Public Policy 2.4 (October-December 1998): 146-156. Ileto, Reynaldo C. “Critical Issues in ‘Understanding Philippine Revolutionary Mentality’.” Philippine Studies 30 (1982): 92-112. __________. “History and Nation in a Tagalog Awit of 1900,” manuscript form, 2000. __________. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979. __________. “The ‘Unfinished Revolution’ in Political Discourse.” In his Filipinos and their Revolution: Events, Discourse, and Historiogaphy. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998. 177-201. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. __________. “History, Language and Reading: Waiting for Crillon,” American Historical Review 100.3 (June 1995): 799-828. __________. Rethinking Intellectual History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Llanes, Ferdinand C. “Nasasanib na mga Agos: Mga Tunguhin sa Historiyograpiyang Pilipino, 1987-1992.” In Pagbabalik sa Bayan: Mga Lektura sa Kasaysayan ng Historiyograpiya at Pagkabansang Pilipino. Edited by Ferdinand C. Llanes. Manila: Rex Book Store, 1993. 71-92. “Malayang Talakayan (Open Forum), Marso 31, Hapon.” In Paksa, Paraan at Pananaw sa Kasaysayan: Ulat ng Unang Pambansang Kumperesnya sa Historiograpiyang Pilipino. Edited by Ma. Bernadette Abrera and Dedina A. Lapar. Quezon City: Department of History, University of the Philippines, 1992. 208-217. Markus, Gyorgy. “Culture: The Making and the Make-up of a Concept (An Essay in Historical Semantics.” Dialectical Anthropology 18.1 (1993): 3-29. May, Glenn A. Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-Creation of Andres Bonifacio. Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1997. Pua, Rogelia Pe, ed. Sikolohiyang Pilipino: Teorya, Metodo at Gamit. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press and Philippine Psychology Research and Training House, 1982. Rafael, Vicente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988. __________. “Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca.” In his White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 163-189. Revel, Jacques. “The Annales: Continuities and Discontinuities,” Review: Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations 1 (Winter-Spring 1978): 9-18. Rorty, Richard The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Salazar, Zeus A. “Ang Historiograpiya ng Tadhana.” In Paksa, Paraan at Pananaw sa Kasaysayan: Ulat ng Unang Pambansang Kumperesnya sa Historiograpiyang Pilipino. Edited by Ma. Bernadette Abrera and Dedina A. Lapar. Quezon City: Department of History, University of the Philippines, 1992. 193-199. __________. “Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas. Isang Balangkas (ca. 250,000 B.K.-1992).” In Pantayong Pananaw: Ugat at Kabuluhan. Pambungad sa Pag-aaral ng Bagong Kasaysayan. Edited by Atoy Navarro, Mary Jane Rodriguez, and Vicente Villan. Mandaluyong: Palimbagang Kalawakan, 1997.127-154. __________. The Malayan Connection: Ang Pilipinas sa Dunia Melayu. Quezon City: Palimbagan ng Lahi, 1998. __________. “Ang Pagtuturo ng Kasaysayan sa Pilipinas.” In Pantayong Pananaw: Ugat at Kabuluhan. Pambungad sa Pag-aaral ng Bagong Kasaysayan. Edited by Atoy Navarro, Mary Jane Rodriguez, and Vicente Villan. Mandaluyong: Palimbagang Kalawakan, 1997. 13-33. __________. “Pantayong Pananaw: Isang Paliwanag.” In Pantayong Pananaw: Ugat at Kabuluhan. Pambungad sa Pag-aaral ng Bagong Kasaysayan. Edited by Atoy Navarro, Mary Jane Rodriguez, and Vicente Villan. Mandaluyong: Palimbagang Kalawakan, 1997. 55-65. __________. “Pantayong Pananaw: Kasaysayang Pampook, Pambayan, at Pambansa.” In Pantayong Pananaw: Ugat at Kabuluhan. Pambungad sa Pag-aaral ng Bagong Kasaysayan. Edited by Atoy Navarro, Mary Jane Rodriguez, and Vicente Villan. Mandaluyong: Palimbagang Kalawakan, 1997. 35-53. __________. “Ang Pantayong Pananaw Bilang Diskursong Pangkabihasnan.” In Pantayong Pananaw: Ugat at Kabuluhan. Pambungad sa Pag-aaral ng Bagong Kasaysayan. Edited by Atoy Navarro, Mary Jane Rodriguez, and Vicente Villan. Mandaluyong: Palimbagang Kalawakan, 1997. 79-125. __________. “Ang Pantayong Pananaw sa Agham Panlipunan: Historiograpiya.” In Pantayong Pananaw: Ugat at Kabuluhan. Pambungad sa Pag-aaral ng Bagong Kasaysayan. Edited by Atoy Navarro, Mary Jane Rodriguez, and Vicente Villan. Mandaluyong: Palimbagang Kalawakan, 1997.67-78. __________. “Wika ng Himagsikan, Lengguwahe ng Rebolusyon: Mga Suliranin ng Pagpapakahulugan sa Pagbubuo ng Bansa.” In Wika, Panitikan, Sining, at Himagsikan. Edited by Atoy Navarro and Raymund Abejo. Quezon City: Palimbagang Pangkasaysayan, 1998 Schumacher, John N. The Propaganda Movement 1880-1895. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1997. Sturtevant, David R. Popular Uprisings in the Philippines, 1840-1940. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976. Thompson, Ewa M. Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Veneracion, Jaime. “Ang Historiyograpiyang Pilipino sa Gitna ng Mga Pagbabagong Panlipunan, 1950-1986.” In Pagbabalik sa Bayan: Mga Lektura sa Kasaysayan ng Historiyograpiya at Pagkabansang Pilipino. Edited by Ferdinand C. Llanes. Manila: Rex Book Store, 1993. 43-66. White, Hayden V. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. __________. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Wiens, Herold J. Han Chinese Expansion into South China. Hamden, Connecticut: Shoestring Press, 1954. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. London: Fontana, 1983. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees. Translated from the German by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1963. Notes on the contributors Caroline S. Hau is an associate professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in Japan. She is the author of Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946-1980, and editor of Filipino-American writer Carlos Bulosan’s novel All the Conspirators, and Intsik: An Anthology of Chinese Filipino Writing, all published in the Philippines. [1]See, for example, Glenn A. May’s Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-Creation of Andres Bonifacio (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1997). [2]Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 283-284. Feyerabend’s phrase should be read in the context of his discussion of the commensurability of different critical approaches to a given field of study. [3] This argument has been advanced by Rodolphe Gasché to support his contention that deconstructive criticism as it is practised in the literature departments in the Anglophone world is only another, perhaps more verbally acrobatic, variation of New Criticism and the impressionistic approaches of traditional academic criticism. See his Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 22-57. [4]See, for example, Fredric Jameson’s recent collection of essays, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998). [5] Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). [6]A useful discussion of the historical sedimentation of concepts of “culture” from their scholarly provenance to everyday life and usage can be found in Gyorgy Markus, “Culture: The Making and the Make-up of a Concept (An Essay in Historical Semantics),” Dialectical Anthropology 18. 1 (1993): 3-29. [7]John N. Schumacher, The Propaganda Movement 1880-1895, revised edition (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1997). [8] Napoleon J. Casambre, “Ang Pagsisimula ng Historiyograpikong Pilipino, 1900-1950,” in Pagbabalik sa Bayan: Mga Lektura sa Kasaysayan ng Historiyograpiya at Pagkabansang Pilipino, edited by Ferdinand C. Llanes (Manila: Rex Book Store, 1993), pp. 28-29. [9] Jaime Veneracion, “Ang Historiyograpiyang Pilipino sa Gitna ng Mga Pagbabagong Panlipunan, 1950-1986,” Pagbabalik sa Bayan, pp. 50, 60. The Filipino phrase above is taken from Veneracion’s paraphrase of the accusation against Ileto made by Milagros Guerrero in her “Understanding Philippine Revolutionary Mentality,” Philippine Studies 29 (1981): 240-256. [10]According to Jaime Veneracion, “Dagdag pa, maaaring naimpluwensiyahan si Agoncillo sa kanyang pagsasanay bilang tao ng panitikan. Kilala siya sa kanyang mga tula at kathang-isip noong mga taong bago ang Digmaan.” Ibid., p. 51. [11] Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 2. [12] For an overview of the Annales “School”, see Jacques Revel, “The Annales: Continuities and Discontinuities,” Review: Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations 1 (Winter-Spring 1978): 9-18. [13]This is not to suggest that the linguistic turn happened evenly across Europe. In France, for example, the linguistic turn—in which Ferdinand de Saussure’s pre-World War I works and Marcel Mauss’ ethnological insights play a key role—occurred only in the wake of existentialism (the main exception, perhaps, is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had been influenced by Saussure), about a generation after the linguistic turn in England. Conversely, in Germany, scholars drew on a hermeneutical tradition dating back to the Reformation that theorized, via Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhem Dilthey, and Hans Gadamer, the intimacy between thought and language. For a discussion of the linguistic turn in the American context, see Dominick LaCapra’s “History, Language and Reading: Waiting for Crillon,” American Historical Review 100.3 (June 1995): 799-828; Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), and History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). [14] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, translated from the German by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), p. 93. Wittgenstein’s counterpart in Oxford, J. L. Austin, author of How to Do Things with Words (1962), was equally influential. See his How to Do Things with Words, Second edition, edited by Marina Sbisa and J.O. Urmsson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). [15] Ibid., p. 126. Heidegger’s student, Han Gadamer, went even further than Wittgenstein and argued, in Truth and Method, that human reality was shaped by human beings’ use of language; always already in language, human beings gain an understanding of reality through their interaction with other people. Unlike Wittgenstein, Gadamer believes that language games are commensurable and translatable. Even more suggestive is Gadamer’s insistence that history itself plays a crucial role in human understanding. See his Truth and Method, Second revised edition, translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1998), especially pp. 381-491. [16] Ibid., p. 19. [17] Wittgenstein, p. 7. Wittgenstein’s notion of “language-games” is drawn from the activities of learning and teaching (especially in the case of children), and from the actual, purposive deployment of language. [18] See, for example, Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated from the French by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. xiii. [19] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, translated from the German by F.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull (Chicago: Open Court, 1922), pp. 223-224. [20]See, for example, Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). [21]See Ewa M. Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). [22] Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) assigns to literary theory the task of reading philosophy through its rhetoric, and argues in favor of reading literature as a kind of philosophy that interrogates the foundations of philosophy itself. [23] Ferdinand C. Llanes, “Nasasanib na mga Agos: Mga Tunguhin sa Historiyograpiyang Pilipino, 1987-1992,” Pagbabalik sa Bayan, p. 73. [24]Reynaldo C. Ileto, “The ‘Unfinished Revolution’ in Political Discourse,” in his Filipinos and their Revolution: Events, Discourse, and Historiography (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998), pp. 180-181. [25] Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979), p. 2. [26] Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1983), p. 90. [27] Violeta V. Bautista, “Ang Programang Doktorado ng DAPP: Kasaysayan at Kasalukuyang Katayuan,” in Pilipinolohiya: Kasaysayan, Pilosopiya, at Pananaliksik, edited by Violeta V. Bautista and Rogelia Pe-Pua (Manila: Kalikasan Press, 1991), pp. 23-36. [28] Ibid., p. 34. [29]Rogelia Pe-Pua, ed., Sikolohiyang Pilipino: Teorya, Metodo at Gamit (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press and Philippine Psychology Research and Training House, 1982). [30] Some of these essays are collected in Pantayong Pananaw: Ugat at Kabuluhan, edited by Atoy Navarro, Mary Jane Rodriguez and Vicente Villan (Mandaluyong: Palimbagang Kalawakan, 1997) and Kasaysayan at Kamalayan: Mga Piling Akda Ukol sa Diskursong Pangkasaysayan, edited by N.M.R. Santillan and M.B.P. Conde (Quezon City: Limbagang Pangkasaysayan, 1998). [31] Zeus A. Salazar, “Ang Historiograpiya ng Tadhana,” Paksa, Paraan at Pananaw sa Kasaysayan: Ulat ng Unang Pambansang Kumperensya sa Historiograpiyang Pilipino, edited by Ma. Bernadette Abrera and Dedina A. Lapar (Quezon City: Department of History, University of the Philippines, 1992), pp. 193-199. See also Romeo Cruz’s “Ang Paggawa ng Tadhana Mula 1980” in the same volume, pp. 200-203, and the Open Forum, pp. 208-217. [32] My reading of Ileto and Rafael is culled from a review essay I wrote on Filomeno Aguilar’s Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island, “Histories and Texts”, Public Policy 2.4 (October- December 1998): 146-156. [33] Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, p. 2. [34]Reynaldo Ileto, “Critical Issues in ‘Understanding Philippine Revolutionary Mentality,’” Philippine Studies 30 (1982): 92-119, especially 101. This essay is Ileto’s response to Milagros Guerrero’s “Understanding Philippine Revolutionary Mentality,” Philippine Studies 29 (1981): 240-56. [35]Ileto, Pasyon, p. 10. [36]Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Revolt of the Masses (Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 1956); David R. Sturtevant, Popular Uprisings in the Philippines, 1840-1940 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); and Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Quezon City: Tala Publishing, 1975). [37]Ileto, Pasyon, p. 11. [38]Ileto, “Critical Issues,” p. 97. [39]Ibid., p. 118. [40]Ileto, Pasyon, pp. 16- 19. [41]Ibid., p. 11. [42]Ileto criticizes the patron-client interpretation of the people’s participation in the Revolution by stating that the concepts of awa (pity) and damay (empathy) not only impel participation in the redemption of Inang Bayan, nor merely posit the inversion of the existing hierarchy, but also create horizontal relations (Ileto discusses millenarian leader Ipe Salvador’s claim that ‘his followers were bound to him, not through economic indebtedness or other forms of vertical attachment, but through mutual damay and caring”). Thus, the “storm” of revolution is characterized by, and imagined by the people as, a breaking of the utang na loob relation between Mother Spain and daughter Filipinas and a “simultaneous horizontal ordering” and “coming together” of the Anak ng Bayan. [43] Ileto, “Critical Issues,” p. 102. [44]Ileto, Pasyon, p. 236. [45] Ileto’s subsequent work has dealt with such topics as the impact of American colonialism on everyday life in the Tagalog region, American Orientalist scholarship on the Philippines, Philippine radicalist discourse, and political discourse on the “unfinished revolution”; these essays are collected in his Filipinos and their Revolution: Events, Discourse, and Historiography (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998). In his latest essay, “History and Nation in a Tagalog Awit of 1900,” he critiques current Philippine scholarship which “has fixed the category of ‘ilustrado’ as a super-elite whose thinking is almost diametrically opposed to the unlettered tao or masses” (2). [46] Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988). [47]Ibid., p. xi. [48]Ibid., p. 8. [49]Ibid. [50]Ibid., p. x. [51]Rafael’s collection of essays, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), contains an essay on Taglish (the national lingua franca that is a hybrid of Tagalog and English) and its fraught relationship to official nationalist attempts to map and circumscribe the terrain of national- popular culture. See his “Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca,” pp. 162-189. [52]Ibid., p. 211. [53]The ensuing critique necessarily touches on issues already brought up and elaborated by Ramon G. Guillermo in his excellent discussion of Salazar’s works in his master’s thesis, “Pook at Panindigigan sa Pagpapakahulugan: Pag-uugat ng Talastasang Sosyalista sa Kalinangang Bayan,” M.A. thesis, University of the Philippines, 1999, Part One. [54]“Ang buod ng pantayong pananaw ay nasa panloob na pagkakaugnay-ugnay at pag-uugnay-ugnay ng mga katangian, halagahin, kaalaman, karunungan, hangarin, kaugalian, pag-aasal at karanasan ng isang kabuuang pangkalinangan—kabuuang nababalot sa, at ipinapahayag, sa pamamagitan ng isang wika; ibig sabihin, sa loob ng isang nagsasauling talastasan/diskursong pangkalinangan o pangkabihasnan.” Zeus A. Salazar, “Ang Pantayong Pananaw Bilang Diskursong Pangkabihasnan,” Pantayong Pananaw: Ugat at Kabuluhan, edited by Atoy Navarro, Mary Jane Rodriguez, and Vicente Villan (Mandaluyong: Palimbagang Kalawakan, 1997), p. 82. [55] Zeus A. Salazar, “Ang Pagtuturo ng Kasaysayan sa Pilipinas,” Pantayong Pananaw, p. 15. [56] Zeus A. Salazar, “Pantayong Pananaw: Kasaysayang Pampook, Pambayan, at Pambansa,” Pantayong Pananaw, p. 43. [57] Ibid., p. 44. [58] Zeus A. Salazar, “Pantayong Pananaw: Isang Paliwanag,” Pantayong Pananaw, pp. 55-56. [59] Ibid., p. 57. [60]Ibid., p. 58. [61] “Cohesive ang mga grupo, dahil bawa’t sa kanila ay may sariling pantayong pananaw na nasasalalay sa pagpanatili ng sariling wika at kultura. Ibig sabihin, kung umaangkin man sila mula sa labas, ito’y inaangkin sang-ayon sa mga konsepto at direksyon ng sariling kalinangan.” Zeus Salazar, “Ang Pantayong Pananaw sa Agham Panlipunan: Historiograpiya,” Pantayong Pananaw, p. 74. See also his “Pantayong Pananaw: isang Paliwanag,” p. 59. [62]Ibid., p. 61. For Salazar’s discussion of the fragmenting power of colonialism, see his “Ang Pantayong Pananaw sa Agham Panlipunan: Historiograpiya,” p. 74. [63]Zeus A. Salazar, “Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas. Isang Balangkas (ca. 250,000 B.K.-1992),” Pantayong Pananaw, pp. 127-154. [64]Zeus A. Salazar, The Malayan Connection: Ang Pilipinas sa Dunia Melayu (Quezon City: Palimbagan ng Lahi, 1998), especially the essays “The Matter with Influence: Our Asian Linguistic Ties”, “’Malay’, ‘Malayan’, and Malayan Civilization’ as Cultural and Anthropological Categories in the Philippines,” and “Für eine Gesamtgeschichte des Malaiisch-Philippinisch-Indonesischen Kulturraums”. [65] Zeus A. Salazar, “Lengguwahe ng Himagsikan, Lengguwahe ng Rebolusyon: Mga Suliranin ng Pagpapakahulugan sa Pagbubuo ng Bansa,” in Wika, Panitikan, Sining, at Himagsikan, edited by Atoy Navarro and Raymund Arthur G. Abejo (Quezon City: U.P. Lipunang Pangkasaysayan, 1998), p. 82. [66]A brief discussion of these charges can be found in Virgilio G. Enriquez, one of the founders of Sikolohiyang Pilipino, in his Pagbabangong-Dangal: Indigenous Psychology and Cultural Empowerment (Quezon City: Akademya ng Kultura at Sikolohiyang Pilipino, 1994), pp. 46-47. [67]“Is expanding the arena of discourse through the use of the Filipino language the sole consideration in the construction of an indigenous history? Does not content figure at all?” Maria Serena Diokno, “Philippine Nationalist Historiography and the Challenge of New Paradigms,” Paper read at the Colloquium on Indigenous Southeast Asian Historiography, 13th Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Tokyo, Japan, 5-9 September 1994, p. 5. [68]Guillermo, pp. 10-11, 23. [69]See “Malayang Talakayan (Open Forum), Marso 31, Hapon,” Paksa, Paraan at Pananaw sa Kasaysayan, pp. 209-217. The taint of collaborationism is also a big issue in literary studies. The most notable example of a writer whose career is shadowed by her personal involvement with the Marcoses is Kerima Polotan Tuvera. [70]Zeus A. Salazar, “Wika ng Himagsikan, Lengguwahe ng Rebolusyon,” pp. 11-92. [71] Salazar, “Ang Pantayong Pananaw Bilang Diskursong Pangkabihasnan,” p. 101. [72] Ramon Guillermo also issues the same warning (ibid., p. 61). [73]Scholarship on Chinese expansion into South China has generally acknowledged that the distinction between Han and non-Han peoples (such as the Yao) is far from simple. See, for example, David Faure’s “The Lineage as a Cultural Invention: The Case of the Pearl River Delta,” Modern China 15 (1989): 4-36. European states have been instrumental as well in mediating the transformation of whole populations from non-Han to Han. See Wolfram Eberhard, China’s Minorities: Yesterday and Today (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1982), pp. 105-47; and Herold J. Wiens, Han Chinese Expansion into South China (Hamden, Connecticut: Shoestring Press, 1954), pp. 130-226. [74] Salazar, The Malayan Connection, pp. 75-76. [75] Guillermo, p. 59. [76]See, for example, the famous exchange between Prospero Covar and Zeus Salazar on the subject of the authorship of Tadhana in the Open Forum, Paksa, Paraan at Pananaw sa Kasaysayan, pp. 210-212.
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