The Lead-In

In 1850, a Franciscan friar residing on the slopes of Mt. Banahaw penned a long, angry letter to the highest authority in the Philippine Islands. His addressee, Governor General Narciso Claveria, had recently ordered a re-enumeration of the colony’s population, concurrently requiring that all native subjects of the colony be assigned permanent and inheritable surnames in order to facilitate the efficient conduct of state functions such as taxation, conscription, and policing. Both tasks had fallen naturally, if awkwardly, upon the shoulders of parish priests, a group of officials unique amongst peninsular Spanish officials in the archipelago for straddling both civil and religious spheres. But in attempting to carry out the detailed instructions of Claveria’s decree, Fray Victoriano del Moral had become progressively more enraged. If this parish priest’s rambling missive generated any official response, it appears to have been lost. But in revealing a febrile “epidemiology of ideas” linking place and history with belonging and authority within the colonial social order, Moral’s missive makes a fitting point of departure for this book’s exploration of Mt. Banahaw’s constitution as an auratic Philippine landscape.

As the priest of Majayjay—a town with fourteen thousand inhabitants scattered across sixty-one barrio settlements— Moral had been apportioned a task that appeared not just unwieldy but Sisyphean by his own description. With only the erratic assistance of a scribe, he despaired even of locating the sizeable proportion of his parishioners who regularly flouted their Christian obligations to attend Mass and observe major feast days. It was of no avail to trek uphill to the cliffs where their huts were perched, noted Moral wearily, for these individuals were constantly crossing over into adjoining towns and provinces, traversing the mountainous backcountry on foot and horseback on mysterious personal business of their own. They habitually switched their places of residence to boot; how many days and nights had he not already wasted in fruitless investigation by composing inquiries and replies to authorities in Manila, Camarines, and provinces still further away? Moreover, when the objects of his inquiries did not actively elude him, they cunningly feigned compliance. If by chance he, Moral, succeeded in extracting a promise to report to the convent on a given day, the individual in question would either fail to appear, or (worse) waste his time by dispatching one or two unrelated and uninformed persons instead. To demand a complete and accurate enumeration of the population in these circumstances, declared Moral in a clear dig at the Governor’s knowledge of local conditions, was to remain wholly and willfully ignorant of the character of the indio.

Thus far Moral’s litany of complaints can be found repeated in colonial records from every part of the archipelago where Spanish authorities set out to sedentarize Filipinos by dictating to them—usually with mixed success-- their livelihoods and places of residence. In more than one sense, however, Moral’s outrage came from a different place. For if re-enumerating the indio population struck him as arduous and wasted labor, the job of renaming its members disturbed his very conscience as a Spaniard and a Christian. Before we can understand why this was the case, we must look briefly at the rationale behind the measure as well as the procedures by which it was supposed to be accomplished. In a bid to reduce the complexity and variability of local naming practices, the decree required personal names to be picked and assigned from a master list prepared specifically for this purpose. One source upon which Claveria’s bureaucrats drew in compiling this Catalogo de Apellidos were archived baptismal rolls, some of which dated back to the era immediately following the Conquest and contained a high proportion of indigenous names. For Claveria, whom James Scott aptly describes as a “high modernist” social engineer par excellance, the historical provenance of the names on the Catalogo was trivial-- as arbitrary, indeed, as the means by which they would now be attached to new bearers. What was important was that these names be made to serve as rigid designators of persons and of lines of descent, thus affording the means of rendering the population “legible” through synoptic representations as well as of recording, tracking, and if necessary apprehending its members.

But for Moral, who saw matters from his vantage point in one of the oldest Catholic convents in the Philippines, founded in 15xx in the foothills of a mountain clothed in native legend, the contents of the Catalogo were all too saturated with significance. Prior to the colonization of the Filipino indios, he noted, “their nomenclature was laced throughout with superstition, just as now it is filled with all that is religious and holy.” Consisting of illusory attachments to spiritual beings as well as to their very dwelling places, the force of superstition led indios to venerate and propitiate a plethora of monsters, mountain peaks, trees, rivers, and caves, thus “blending idolatry with atheism” in denial of the one true God. The prospect of bestowing upon his parishioners the “superstitious nomenclature” of their pagan forefathers-- some of it derived from native words for trees, animals, and unmentionable parts of the body— was thus morally repugnant to Moral, for it was tantamount to reversing the course of the Filipino indios’ centuries-long journey from barbarism towards civilization, a journey only made possible by the devoted sacrifices of legions of religious brethren. As he forcefully put it, “To restore now to the indios their old names is to recall to them their former state of idolatry, their customs, and all the beings which formerly claimed their reverence.”

Writing several decades before the arrival of folklore and anthropology upon the scene, Moral appears anxiously attuned to the allusive power of what savants in those incipient sciences would come to call “survivals.” Since Malinowski, the practice of studying prior forms of social organization or collective mentality by identifying and extrapolating from “surviving” present-day customs or beliefs has been relegated to the attic of pseudoscience and reviled as an instrument of evolutionary and racist prejudice. Indubitably on target, this criticism nevertheless falls wide of its mark in one respect. For the methodological refutation of “the doctrine of survivals” makes it easy to ignore—and thus difficult to recuperate—the work of imagination that is entailed in the very constitution of extant ethnological, linguistic or material signs as lingering fragments of the past. But a different approach, one adopted here and elsewhere throughout this book, would take “the survival” seriously enough to unpack the resemblances and connections congealed in its form and to ask what was at stake for those who apprehended and were moved by them.

Along these lines, let us therefore consider a handful of grim associations that sprang forth from Moral’s imagination to link the feared recrudescence of beliefs and customs in the Banahaw backcountry to critical moments in the history of Christendom and Spain. At one point, Moral invoked the Hebrew Bible (most likely drawing from 1 Kings and Judges) to argue that just as the misconceived retention of pagan honorifics such as “Ba’al” had encouraged early Levantine Israelites to confound the worship of Yahweh with that of local deities, so too the restoration of indigenous personal names to indios would invite them to corrupt the Catholic faith with the superstitions of their race. Elsewhere, Moral emphasized the high stakes of implanting Claveria’s decree given attendant risks of strengthening local opposition to Spanish rule. While serving as the parish priest of the neighboring town of Lucban in 1841, Moral had witnessed a major rebellion led by an indio lay priest named Apolinario, who, together with several thousand of his followers, took his last stand against the colonial army on the slopes of Mt. Banahaw. In his letter of 1850, Moral did not miss the opportunity to reap authority from his familiarity with the foothills towns, where, as he put it, “many still weep over the fresh blood of fathers, children, brothers, and wives.” To cap off his warning, Moral alluded to the cataclysmic secession of the American creole colonies from the Spanish empire a mere three decades previously, “What account of religion and Hispanitude shall we leave to posterity?” he demanded, adding, “In the whole of the Americas this is all that remains to us!”

The poetics of naming that takes shape in Moral’s letter thus turns Mt. Banahaw itself into a figure of sorts, scanning its voluminous folds to disclose transposed ignominies of barbaric antiquity as well as of modern empire. While mountains everywhere seem to fill up with an excess of significance much as craters do with water, the logics of those semiotic associations are always particular and historically contingent. The uncanny dread evoked in Moral by merely thinking of the survival of Filipino animism was broadly characteristic of one strand of nineteenth century European thought, which fixated upon historical remnants as signs of a curse laid upon the present by a past that constantly threatened to repeat itself through the mechanism of degeneration.

I invoke the motif of the uncanny advisedly, for like the survival (whose concept it expresses in a more emotive guise), the uncanny was a key idiom by which nineteenth century modernism framed its own susceptibility to being pierced by shards of the past buried within the present. But in contrast to the relative sobriety with which anthropologists like Tylor collected and categorized customs, material artifacts, and linguistic items as detritus left by the evolutionary succession of one social form by the other, the uncanny vein of survivalist thinking was nightmarish in its propensities. For how else but in a nightmare could the specters of Baal and Bolivar have joined up at Mount Banahaw to haunt Fray Victorino?