Stephen Acabado’s column in Rappler a few weeks back was entitled ‘The precolonial Filipino you’re looking for never existed’. He wrote:
Some of our colleagues [in Indigenous studies, anthropology, archaeology, history, and heritage work] remain preoccupied with the idea that decolonization means locating an authentic Indigenous self in a precolonial past, as if Indigenous peoples are unchanging, as if history happened everywhere else but somehow stopped at the edge of Indigenous worlds… It appears whenever people ask what is truly Filipino, purely native, or really precolonial. It appears in arguments about food, ritual, architecture, and language. It also appears in national histories that search for one interior cultural voice that can stand in for the whole archipelago, as if the many peoples of these islands once shared one worldview, one cultural core, one story. That story offers coherence and a way around colonial injury by searching for a self supposedly untouched by it.
I immediately thought of that project by some Filipino artists in search of—and hoping to retrieve—a mythical pre-Christian, pre-Muslim Filipino soul, which they would portray in their works. Sometimes, they would describe this identity as Malay, in kinship with our regional neighbors in what is today called Southeast Asia. Acabado’s arguments directly challenge this notion. Among other things, the very concept of a Filipino is inseparable from the Christian, colonial conquest of the islands.
…“Filipino” is not an ancient identity recovered from the deep past. It is a historical and political category shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and the modern state. To search for an authentic precolonial Filipino is to project the nation backward into a time when it did not yet exist.
Archaeology makes that hard to sustain. The deeper we dig, the less believable purity becomes… Communities did not simply absorb outside influences. They selected, reworked, and gave local meaning to what moved across seas. The precolonial past was already shaped by encounter.
Nick Joaquin, a National Artist of the Philippines, was already convinced decades ago of this inerasable colonial ingredient of our national identity, when he wrote about the Filipino soul being born upon contact with Western technology. I imagine the notion being frowned upon because of its apparently apologetic attitude (a criticism thrown at much of Joaquin’s works), but Joaquin was merely acknowledging what Acabado is now reiterating, that without the Spanish conquest, there would be no such thing as a Filipino identity. It is in the name itself—Filipinos having received their nombre from one of the Spanish empire’s 16th-century rulers.
Joaquin also observed that the less than desirable traits we popularly accept as helping to define the Filipino, which we supposedly inherited from our indigenous past, are not at all unique to our part of the world: “the qualities usually cited as ‘typically’ Asian…Greek fatalism…Celtic languor and sloth…intense Teutonic blood and clan ties…Latin touchiness and vendetta…”
National and cultural identity is made up, to a large degree, by a remixing of elements from other cultures and other nations; identity remains at most a fuzzy concept, impossible to define with clear boundaries and markers. It is, furthermore, not static, being continually reforged and renewed.
Acabado writes that the futility of finding cultural purity also shatters concepts of authenticity:
What people now defend as authentic usually carries a long history of change. The same issue appears in how Indigenous peoples are represented. They are too often treated as custodians of a frozen past. Their legitimacy is judged by how closely they match outsider fantasies of tradition. A community that participates in state institutions or adjusts ritual life to present needs may be dismissed as less authentic. Anthropology helped build that trap by rewarding timelessness and by treating change as contamination.
He also touches upon the problem of cultural appropriation:
Scholars, heritage workers, and public intellectuals cannot keep mining Indigenous communities for symbols that support national pride while ignoring their struggles in the present. We cannot celebrate textiles, terraces, rituals, and ancestral landscapes while remaining quiet about land dispossession, extraction, displacement, or token consultation. It is easy to claim Indigenous pasts as part of national heritage. It is harder to stand with Indigenous peoples when rights, land, and political voice are at stake.
In other words: what renders the act of appropriation especially grave is a lack of accompanying solidarity. I suppose many or all of us have been guilty of that to some degree. It is an offense that we cannot make amends for by conjuring and then making claims to a pure but ahistorical cultural identity.