Vicente Sotto Lecture Series February 2021 Opening Remarks

Maayong hapon kanatong tanan!

A few days ago, when I first shared on my Facebook profile the poster for this event, another friend of mine on the platform, as well as a Carolinian contemporary, shared the same post on his profile with a caption beginning with the sentence: “Huge part of our history is in the archives in Spain.” A well-known fact among us within the academe, lesser known and likely even taken for granted by those outside it.

If you tuned in to last month’s installment of this lecture series, you will probably recall how a good number of questions during the open forum revolved around the ethics of this whole “former colonizers still controlling much of the archives” arrangement and how, despite a recent cultural shift[1] marked by a growing awareness among young people of just how much “unlearning” and “decolonizing” there is to do, some issues still remain somewhat “dense”—to use the word of our previous speaker, Dr. Cristina Juan.

While these universities and institutions in the Global North have undeniably made great strides in making a number of these documents as accessible as possible via digitization and online archives, the fact that much of this knowledge still doesn’t trickle down to non-academics in the Global South, particularly young students by way of classroom material, for example, is still quite unfortunate.

Amid the increasing homogeneity of a globalized world, as languages die out and centuries-old traditions and customs cease to be practiced, a sense of rootedness—of knowing where you come from, of being aware of the distinctiveness of your culture and milieu—is, I think, of great importance. In the Cebuano setting, such a sense of rootedness ought to be given greater urgency, considering how many of the aspects we tout about this province—that we are an ideal place for foreign businesses to invest in, that we speak the least accented English in the region, that we boast a “globally competitive” labor force—still operate within a limited economic framework.

As such, many Cebuanos—severed from their past, or taught to scorn it, and likely robbed of the ability to question the current state of things—make every effort to pander to and survive a system, a global order, that is not of our making. This is just as true for other societies in the so-called “developing world,” former colonies whose inhabitants were coerced into adhering to laws and mechanisms formulated by more historically advantaged cultures. Consequently, this translates into a great number of people in this day and age blaming themselves for circumstances that are often a result of events beyond their control, or deluding themselves into thinking that they are empowered, entitled individuals destined to overcome adversity and sociopolitical realities that are separate from or immaterial to their being.

Personally, I don’t really know that much about precolonial Filipino or Cebuano society, but the broad picture I’ve been able to sketch, based on the readings I’ve consulted, is one quite similar to that of other Southeast Asian cultures, but also unique in its own way, arguably even more egalitarian than the Christianized/Hispanicized order we’ve been operating under for close to five centuries now, both in terms of gender and class. This is not to say, of course, that the precolonial past was itself a utopia and I advocate for a wholesale revival of the values of the time. I’m sure few of us would be agreeable to having ourselves inked for every accomplishment we achieve, or for the guys, having penis rings surgically inserted at the behest of our female partners.[2] But I think there are certain traits and sensibilities that we can uncover and apply as a lens of sorts in looking at the world today, particularly in such a pivotal time as the one we are currently living through.

One of the more fascinating words in the Cebuano language, in my opinion, is katalagman, a calamity, whose root word, according to John Wolff’s dictionary, is tagam, meaning to “refrain from repeating an act as a result of an unpleasant experience previously undergone.”[3] In his book, The Art of Not BeingGoverned: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, anthropologist James Scott surmises how, because calamities were so much a part of the precolonial Southeast Asian landscape, many populations likely developed their own “routines of disaster” or “crisis repertoires.”[4] Possible examples of this included peasants having a knowledge of what “famine foods” to consume to tide them over during food shortages, routines for dispersal, escape, and searching for alternative means of subsistence.

When I first came across this point by Scott, I immediately thought of the word katalagman and how, this is only a supposition, it was coined or formulated within this context of “learning a practice from disaster.” Perhaps, to Cebuano/Binisaya speakers of an earlier time, a calamity—besides being an obviously tragic event—was also an occasion for learning, for developing routines and repertoires so as to mitigate the effects of a similar calamity in the future. Now, try to imagine, for a second, how such a sensibility would play out in contemporary times, as government agencies and officials continue to grant permits for quarrying projects in the mountains, despite the grade 3 level of knowledge that such acts cause landslides and exacerbate flooding in the lowlands, or as businessmen “develop” natural geographical features such as mangroves and rocky coasts into white-sand beach resorts or seaside rest houses, only to be startled by the combined forces of water and wind during typhoon season.

The Vicente Sotto Lecture Series offers that opportunity, however briefly, for the Cebuano—or really anyone with an interest for things Cebuano—to glimpse those quirks, traits, or sensibilities that make us distinctly who we are, with the hope that you take these newfound learnings not just as mere bits of trivia you can spout at the dinner table or over a drinking session, but as a unique means of viewing the world, making sense of certain phenomena, and perhaps even resisting hegemonic constructs and perceptions.

Dear audience, welcome to the Vicente Sotto Lecture Series for February 2021. Daghang salamat for joining us, and may we all have a fruitful afternoon.

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[1] See a young Inuk woman in Canada learn throat singing (a native practice banned by Christian missionaries) from her mother here. Meanwhile, click here to see footage of the toppling of a British slave trader’s statue and its even more glorious rolling into a river during an anti-racism protest in the UK. And if you’re in the mood for something heartwarming, see here for news of the taking down of a conquistador’s statue in Peru by indigenous activists.

[2] See Resil Mojares, “Visayan Erotica,” from House of Memory; pp. 25–30.

[3] John Woolf, Cebuano Dictionary for Android. Version 1.3.

[4] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia; p. 163.