Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2012. 248 pp. Euro79.00. ISBN 978-3-659-13083-0.
This book consists of five essays that examine “the regional and historical contexts in which Filipino civilization should be studied” (4). One is immediately struck by the hortatory tone that Niels Mulder takes. He wants to tell readers—Filipinos included—that his is the proper way to study Filipino culture and society. While the prescriptive aim is fine, the slippages in execution are far too numerous to allow him this conceit.
Mulder claims that the only way “current Filipino civilisation should be understood” is “in its regional and historical contexts” (6). He starts with summations of the writings of historians of “pre-modern” Southeast Asia, but mutates into an elaboration on the similarity between the Filipinos’ concepts of individuality, conscience, private-versus-public spheres to those of the Thais and the Indonesians. The reason is that these are the three societies that he studied and lived in.
Unfortunately, the comparisons are not convincing. The same themes can be easily found in Latin American societies with which the Philippines—because of Spain via Mexico and the Catholic Church—shares some common bond. And what of another and more believable comparison: that of the Philippines and the United States, which actually brought in many of these “values,” and as Alfred McCoy has pointed out, also imported a lot from the Philippines? Why force a regional comparison when a colony-metropole contrast may yield more fruitful insights? Mulder does not tell us why his approach is superior; he just assumes it is, merely citing the purported binary of excessive concern of Filipino scholars with either the application of Western concepts or the search for indigenous roots of current society.
Mulder quietly shelves a region in the Philippines that is most Southeast Asian: Muslim Mindanao. Muslim Mindanao was hardly touched by Spanish colonialism and maintained its linkages with Southeast Asia despite a more effective American colonial state. The regional connections (and thus the contexts for meaningful comparisons) are there even today, in part because of the difficulty of policing these frontier zones. The reason for this lacuna is quite obvious: Mulder knows hardly anything about that part of the country (his account of the “Muslim rebellion” is exceedingly sparse).
Mulder argues that Filipino nationhood is insufficient because of the absence of a moral order as manifested in a “centre of civilisation” (7). Filipinos are thus divided into “two nations … the largely mestizo state-owning class and the ‘common tao’” (7). The latter’s separation is further “enhanced by the systematic exclusion of the ordinary citizen from the oligarchic political process.” This is an inaccurate depiction. Mestizos could indeed be found in positions of political and administrative power, but they hardly “owned” these pedestals, sharing it with non-mestizos as far back as the early post-war period. Were Presidents Garcia, Magsaysay and Marcos, as well as the majority of the members of the legislature mestizos? Hardly. It is class not the colour of one’s skin that informs oligarchic dominance; the ruling class was, and remains, ethnically diverse. And were the progressive “visionaries” really marginalized and made “irrelevant to the public agenda” (38)? Not really: the social scientist Gerald Clarke has shown otherwise.
Mulder explores (folk?) religiosity to further underscore this moral gap. But once he extends this to politics, his attempts at careful ethnography soon give way again to summaries of familiar histories. Further, certain actors’ impacts on history are overblown while others are misplaced. True, the Catholic Church did mobilize thousands in February 1986 to protect the military plotters against President Marcos, but a more convincing explanation was the way in which the plotters outmaneuvered the dictator in the fight over the support of the majority of the military that stood on the sidelines. The late Mario Bolasco succinctly explained that during the 1986 “People Power Revolution” against Marcos, the higher the class status, the more religious the participants were. It was more likely that “ordinary folks” joined the EDSA revolution for more secular reasons. Another example: The statement “Following the assassination of Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino on 23 [sic—it was the 21st] August 1983, the ideas of the sixties resounded again throughout society” is simply not true (38). In fact, the Communist Party and its allied organizations soon found that the “sixties” slogans and ideas they thought to have had proprietary rights over were outmatched by the smaller, looser, but more creative non-Left coalitions.
Finally, Mulder sees English as one of the culprits behind the problems of nationhood. He claims that it is a language that is not spoken by ordinary people, but it permeates the PA systems and advertisements in malls, shops, town halls and banks, the voice of the dominant elite loudly broadcasting to the masses. In actuality, English has become an enduring part of the national linguistic landscape. It has assumed a local hue in such everyday greetings as “Good morning Ma’am-Sir” and it blends itself with the other languages to create Tag-lish in the Manila area and Vis-English in the Central Visayas.
Why is there so much missing here, when compared to Mulder’s insights on Thai and Indonesian societies (one notices his propensity to cite himself as the main source of things Thai)? One suspects it is his lack of access to the Filipino languages. There is no evidence that Mulder is respectively fluent in Tagalog, Visayan, Ilocano or any of the Muslim languages, and in this book he is solely reliant on English language sources. Perhaps the Philippines—because of English—need not be treated as intimately as Thailand.
Mulder states that he has developed “the comfort of a thick skin” (207) in the long years he stayed in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, where he had “many confrontations with ‘the other’” (207). Perhaps he does not care what the “natives” of these societies think of his public views about them. Unfortunately, despite such sententious assertions this book adds nothing new to the study of the Philippines.
Patricio N. Abinales
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Honolulu, USA
pp. 189-191