Some Philippine mythology

The original Noli

The non-original Urduja

Noli: Spanish-language nationalist novel ("Noli me tangere") by national hero José Rizal. Obligatory reading in all high schools (in English or Filipino).

Urduja: warrior princess of Pangasinan (ca. 1350), widely believed to be historical but in fact invented by Arab globetrotter Ibn Battuta, one of many who took advantage of the period of Eurasian peace that followed the Mongol conquests. The increased international contact produced a lot of travel stories, trade opportunities, and quite possibly the Black Death as well. The entire Urduja story is based on one sentence in his Rihla ("Trip"), which alleges that she was "the ruler of Kaylukari in the land of Tawalisi"...

People power imagery I: Peaceful demonstrations on EDSA

People power imagery II: A "simple housewife" turned president

Tita Cory: Corazon Aquino, the widow of Ninoy Aquino, catapulted into power after the latter's assassination in what was probably the first of the "Velvet Revolutions".
Two national holidays celebrate the "advent of democracy": People Power Day (Feb. 25) and Ninoy Aquino Day (Aug. 21).

Aswang: a mythical vampire-like creature. There is a lot of residual belief in supernatural creatures, though the conceptions vary widely. Aswang are typically normal people by day and strange mutants or animals by night, preying on pregnant women and their unborn children. Some have special appendages to suck the kids out of the womb. Not surprisingly, they are invariably female. There is a special oil which boils when they come near; and they are scared of of large shiny objects such as Ang Panday's  sword.

A non-Philippine depiction of an aswang

Ang Panday ("The Blacksmith"), who defeats
a variety of scary creatures in this 2009 film.

to be continued...

Steinzeitschwindel

Personae dramatis:

1. Manuel Elizalde, a wealthy Filipino looking for eternal fame
2. Dafal, a Mindanao hunter looking for a little extra cash
3. About 25 Mindanao villagers
4. A few empty caves
5. The mysterious and adventurous appeal of "uncontacted peoples"
6. A little more cash to grease the wheels
7. Some fake stone axes.

A Tasaday family operating a Palaeolithic fire drill

The result: the "Tasaday", the most primitive people on earth, whose technology had not progressed beyond the "Stone Age". Elizalde announced his discovery in 1972; articles in the National Geographic as well as a tv documentary ensued, and the area where the Tasaday lived was fenced off to "protect" them from outside interference.

In 1986, shortly after the demise of the Marcos regime, the hoax was exposed by Swiss anthropologist Oswald Iten. Being among Marcos' closer associates, Elizalde had already fled the Philippines with $35 million dollars from the non-profit organization that he had set up to promote the Tasaday's interests. He ended up in Costa Rica, where he became addicted to drugs, and died impoverished in 1997.
 

Manuel Elizalde in 1970, two years before his "discovery"

Diversity

For an urban resident of Thailand it is relatively easy to overlook the fact that South-East Asia is linguistically a very diverse region. Within a 700 km radius from Bangkok, four major families are represented with literally hundreds of very different languages. In addition there is the isolate Hmong-Mien group. See the pictures below.

The least well known of the three big groups is the Austroasiatic family. Within the group, only Khmer (Cambodian), Vietnamese and Mon, now moribund, have a substantial written history; they are assumed to have a common ancestor at an estimated time depth of 6500 years.

In historical linguistics, now the bête noire of institutional language research, there is a small but tenacious community of "superfamily freaks", who spend their efforts trying to prove or disprove the interrelatedness of language families. In addition to the fabled Nostratic, they have postulated an immensely conjectural Austric macrofamily; at its widest this monster would include all of Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Austronesian and Hmong-Mien. This hypothesis by the eminent Paul K. Benedict dates from 1942, surely a golden year for pre-scientific historical linguistics. One stated rationale for this racial genetics of languages is to trace cultural and population dispersal; among the unfortunate drawbacks are the sheer time depths (ca. 14,000 years for Nostratic, probably about the same for Austric), a flawed methodology and an utter lack of reliable material for most of the languages involved...

Little black people

Early human migration as evidenced in mitochondrial DNA

Homo sapiens arrived in the Philippines in two waves, three if you count modern colonialism. In the first wave, which started around 70,000 years ago, the species slowly spread from the Horn of Africa along the southern coasts of Asia, living initially on what they could find on the beach. Sea levels were low enough in this period so that they could walk across to many parts of what is now the Philippines, where they probably settled around 23,000BC.

The second wave was very recent and much faster, and started around 5000 BC. Having descended from the highlands of Yunnan in Southern China to Taiwan, a people who spoke a language now "known" as Proto-Austronesian set out on large community boats to conquer not only the Malay Archipelago but the whole Pacific. New Zealand is their most recent destination and was first settled only in 800AD. These people obviously lived initially on what they could find in the sea.

There is a lot of uncertainty about the ensuing processes of language distribution, acculturation and intermarriage which have produced the present situation, where the vast majority of the inhabitants "are" Austronesians. As with the Indo-European expansions elsewhere, the traditional perception (based mainly on linguistic data) is that the "new people" largely supplanted the "original people" (orang asli in Malay) thanks to their superior technology for weaponry, transport and/or livelihood. The reality may be rather more intricate.

But in the Pacific, the Austronesians had the distinct advantage of being the first human settlers.

So in the Philippines today, the vast majority of inhabitants are "descendants" of the second wave. They speak Austronesian languages related to Malay. The Little Black People (as they were derogatorily called by the Spanish: negritos) have now dwindled to a few thousand in the Andamans, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand, struggling to survive in marginal areas.

A "little black man" in a tree, presumably about to harvest a beehive

The best known of the Philippine negrito peoples are the Batak of the island of Palawan, who are incidentally not "the same as" or "related to" the Indonesian Batak.

In the run-up to the third, most recent wave of settlement, all the known and unknown lands West of a certain demarcation line were "given, granted, and assigned" (donamus, concedimus et assignamus) to Spain by Pope Alexander VI in the bull Inter caetera (1493). This bull has yet to be repealed, despite some recent demands made by Amerindian Catholics. The lands discovered to the West included the "Philippine" archipelago.

One interesting aspect of Spanish colonial society was its institutionalised racism, which served both to legitimize the slave trade and to define and protect the privileged status of the European colonists. Being white meant being born to rule; yet in colonial society there was an ever-growing contingent of people of ambiguous status because of their "mixed blood". So it became a vital task to lay down exactly how the different degrees of racial intermixing fitted into the overall social system.

For instance, the product of a white person and an indio was obviously non-white: the name invented for this was mixticius or mestizo. Diluted with another element of "purity", the child of a mestizo and a white person was a castizo. And according to some, a third dilution step (7/8) was enough to produce a full white, presumably on condition of a proper European upbringing.

Mixtures of black and white or black and indio were also accounted for, although no person with even a drop of black blood could ever qualify as a white, because the justification for the slave trade rested on defining Africans as subhuman, i.e. as animals. The orang asli were of course classified as black and assumed to have migrated from Africa.

There were literally hundreds of words for every imaginable "colour fraction". Noteworthy is that some of the grades with a black component were denoted by animal words: mulato (i.e. mule), coyote, lobo (i.e. wolf) etc.

This obsession with caste peaked in the late XVIIIc with the popularity of educational paintings visualising part of this "racial spectrum": pinturas de castas.

As in South America, the enduring legacy of colonialism in the Philippines is a high degree of racial prejudice, although conceptualized mostly in terms of actual skin colour, and a predictable obsession with whitening products.