Chapter Notes

A recent issue of the New Yorker made reference to a classic essay of E.B. White's in which he observed that natives, transients, and settlers make distinct contributions to the ethos of a city like New York in the form of a sense of the past, cosmopolitanism, and energy respectively.  I like this typology a lot and plan to borrow it for Chapter 2.

Karen Strassler's draft on Ratu Kedeng, the Spirit Queen, lays out the notion that participating in a national regime of visuality (though the circulation of one's image by others or by placing images in circulation oneself)  is a critical aspect of belonging within the nation. This dimension of the imagined community begins with introduction of photography and becomes further elaborated and intensified with the expanded reach of the mass media and the accessibility of visual technologies.

I think this idea is really important for my project as well. The increasing salience of Mt. Banahaw in the national media (as a result of local as well as nonlocal and translocal projects) is a theme I visit and revisit continually in many if not all of my chapters, but I have not yet really accounted for it in analytical terms. I need to develop an argument about it in the Introduction, so that I can then refer back to it in various chapters where the media reports (including photographs) are discussed.

Finally, teaching the "culture" course has made me think more about American anthropology and the Philippines (not so much colonial ethnography as the impact of the "culture and personality" school on perceptions of Filipino culture). Sapir's "Culture, Genuine and Spurious," was a touchpoint for me here, as it helped me to understand how the Boasian idea of culture (i.e. everybody has it and to the same degree) could lead to the apparently inconsistent position that some people's culture is less worth studying than others (because they are "acculturated"). Again, I think I will need to make reference to this in my Introduction. It seems to me that to the extent that the "we have no culture" discourse is still potent in the Philippines, it is because it has been kept alive in the oppositional stances of Filipino culture theorists of the pantayong pananaw camp, which is itself a highly cosmopolitan movement whose enunciations are metapragmatically complex. So, too, then are their treatments of Mt. Banahaw, which are not really aimed at the recuperation of autochthonous culture but rather at something a bit different.

Finally, I am starting to think it would be a good idea to make space in the Introduction to discuss the various forms of "semiotic mediation" (Mertz and Parmentier) that are explored throughout this book with reference to Mt. Banahaw