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?

Strategies for Knowing an Asian Mountain

This was the title of a very stimulating talk that I attended by Ruth Rogaski, an East Asia Historian at Vanderbilt. The talk was subtitled "Changshaiban, 1600-present" and forms part of Rogaski's larger project on relationships between nature and empire in Manchuria.

Rogaski opened her talk with a question, "How do we know a mountain?" She then offered a series of answers, each represented by a sign or image indexing a particular way that a distinct historical actor might set about "knowing" a mountain. The signs/images included numbers (the height of Changshaiban), Changshaiban's secret name, its cartographic location, aand photos representing the experience of reaching the summit (a photo of an ancient stairway at the summit), the experience and expertise involved in climbing (gear), iconographic conventions (Chinese paintings), calligraphy on rocks, technology (a 3-D GIS map that shows the mountain aerially with its 3-mile wide crater lake clearly visible), etc. Rogaski indicated that Changshaiban is unique amongst Chinese mountains in having no temples and very few tourists and alluded to its mythic stature as the birthplace of the Chinese imperial lineage.

Rogaski used the 3-D map as a jumping off point (why do people use this expression for mountain climbing when it seems to suggest diving into the sea?) for the body of her talk, noting that "this is not at all how the 17th century emperor Kanshu (sp?) thought about the birthplace of his imperial lineage. Claiming that nobody had accurate knowledge of the mountain, he sent a delegation to study it. Changshaiban afforded Kanshi a means of self-fashioning, of using a tactile observation of nature as a way to perform political power. In a stylized narrative essay, he wrote of the multiple strategies that the mountain used to avoid being seen, summoning cloaking clouds and mists at will. In his essay, he portrayed the mountain as too sacred to stay long to look at. Here Rogaski finds a similar tension to that discussed by Bill Cronin in "The Trouble with Wildness," namely that between sacredness the compulsion to explore. The person who gets to map a place that is off-limits often takes on the responsibility of keeping it hidden. ("Once a mountain is apprehended as 'the sublime face of a God,' only a prophet might gaze upon it for long.")

I really liked the way Rogaksi used images in her talk, juxtaposing very different perspectives of the mountain while also managing to gesture at the fact that the basic identity of the mountain lies in a persistent quality, albeit differently construed: it is elusive and off-limits. I am wondering whether her visual and discursive strategy of juxtaposing the many perspectives that come together around Changshaiban might be a good one for me to adopt for the as-yet unwritten conclusion or epilog to my book? (Another logical place to use this strategy is in Chapter 1, although I am leery of overhauling that yet again.)

Ideas Gleaned from Talks

Over the past few weeks, I've attended three talks where I discovered important resonances with my own book project: Kyonosuke Hirai, "Materializing Knowledge: palm-leaf manuscript-Making Making in Northern Thailand, (Mar 19), Amita Baviskar, "Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: The Politics of Nature on the Streets of Delhi, India," and the introduction to Catherine Becker's book manuscript in progress on Andhra Buddhist sites (South Asia Workshop, April 1). While the three projects connect in quite different ways with my own material, I think it is interesting that they are all about material objects, materiality, and aesthetic sensibilities. It is exactly these dimensions of Mt. Banahaw that I feel is currently missing from my manuscript, and I would really like to develop these themes in my final revisions.

Catherine Becker's work about the interpretation of Amravati and other Andhra Buddhist sites in art history textbooks as well as their packaging in A.P. tourism brochures has the closest links to my own work. Her project situates AP's Buddhist sites in a number of "frames" -- art historical discussions, ritual (Amravati hosted a consecration ceremony officiated by the Dalai Lama in 2006, in which Tibetans in exile came to stand in for India's "absent" Buddhist community), tourism promotion, regional development (Buddhism is part of a "river of knowledge" that flows through history into the present-day identity of the state as an IT hub), etc. Successive "enframings" of the same site provide the narrative arc of Catherine's book project, much as successive and simultaneous "enframings" of Mt. Banahaw provide the narrative arc of my own. Particularly helpful here is the idea of the reliquary as "creating" the relic-- without it, all one has is a heap of dust. (In order to make the concept of "enframing" more salient in my book, I need to figure out how it relates to the other concept that I think of as central, namely "scale." Is one subordinate to the other in my argument? Something that Bilal said strikes me as relevant here, namely that every actor who engages with Amravati does not construct a "frame" out of whole cloth; rather, some of these frames are already in play and brochure writers (and others) have to maneouver within them. That is very much how I think about "scale-making" by actors related to Mt. Banahaw-- as a form of imaginative work/practice which is also constrained by hegemonic ideas of the "local," "regional," and global" as nested levels of social reality.

Another dimension of Catherine's project struck a powerful chord of recognition in me. One (nicely elaborated by Ananya Vajpeyi in her comments) had to do with the various absences at the heart of Amravati (of living Buddhist tradition, of evidence about the construction, purpose and uses of the site in history)-- all of which are in some way made productive by the work of enframing. This is done in part through discursive means. (Here I thought of the "cracks in the parchment curtain" trope-- the notion that metropolitan Filipinos come to Mt. Banahaw to see the absence of something and in that absence they find presence.) Aside from discourse however, the emptiness at the heart of the site itself is also made productive through semiotic work and practices-- signage, markings, etc. During the consecreation ritual at Amravati, relics were brought in to fill-- but also to highlight-- the emptiness of the stupa. (It reminded me of how pilgrims bring in prints of Catholic saints or or Mary and juxtapose them with a natural shrine, and also of the erection of concrete tablets with the Ten Commandments, etc. in the forest.) I need to think more about the semiotic work done by the uses of space and the materiality of the pwestos, specifically for my chapter on pilgrimage.

Territoriality, Memory, and the Holy Land

In brief reading sessions scattered over the weekend, I dug into a couple of promising concepts that could help me connect my book's overarching analytical concerns (scale, cultural citizenship, Christianity) with a number of the ethnographic insights and intuitions that I have carried along with me for some time (without knowing quite what to do with them.) One is new terrain for me (territoriality) while the other I is one I've tinkered with in the past without really taking it anywhere (social memory).

Human Territoriality is a functionalist and confusingly schematic read (lots of diagrams, etc.) but will definitely be helpful in helping me justify and motivate the division of labor between Chapters 1 and 2, which deal respectively with aspects of place making that are tied up with colonial strategies and those related to cultural memory. It will also be very useful as a language for talking about shifts between key frameworks of place-making and governmentality at Mt. Banahaw over a the 150-year time span of the book.

• "Territoriality" really illuminates the Claveria surname decree in a new way for me
  
• the conceptual production of "empty space" and the notion of "place clearing" are useful tools for reading the ereccion de pueblos
• In general, the theory reveals many more interesting things to say about the colonial town-settlement pattern than I had previously succeeded in saying.
• The fact that territoriality as a strategy involves the production of nested hierarchies shows me that how it is possible to both discuss (i) scale qua territoriality in terms of hierarchical levels and (ii) scale as a socially constructed frame for subjectivity (which involves both the work of the imagination and agency.

A footnote in Human Territoriality to a book by Davies on the imagination of the Holy Land in early Christianity) set me on a trail that eventually led me to social memory. Before getting to that, however, I want to mention a couple of other sources on constructions of the Holy Land, which is a topic I'll definitely need to address in the introduction to the book: Halbwach's essay on the Legendary Topography of the Holy Land in the Gospels; Bowman's essay in Contesting the Sacred; Noonan's The Road to Jerusalem: Pilgrimage and Travel in the Age of Discovery. I would also like to read up on simulacra and displacements of the Holy Land, including Wharton's Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks, and Adrienne Hamilton's MA thesis on the House of Loreto. The latter's bilbiography alerted me to Assman's book Religion and Cultural Memory, which in turn led me to a cluster of recent essays on social memory by Olick, Sutton, and Wertsch, all of which appeared in a recent issue of Social Research.

Assman's work draws on Freud's suggestion in "Moses and Monothesism" that a facility for cultural memory exists that is neither a "collective unconscious" nor simply identical to the mechanisms of individual memory. The promise of the approach, as Olick describes it, is that allows one to trace continuities and recurrences (after long gaps) in cultural discourse that cannot be termed "instrumental." (Interestingly, Derrida engages with this Freud text in his book Archive Fever.) Sutton's essay from cognitive studies perspective tries to demystify some of the microprocesses that might be involved in getting from individual to social memory (involving emotion and transpersonal agency, for example) and is thus potentially complementary even if very different from the level at which Assman is operating.

• The "cultural memory" approach strikes me as a very promising frame for situating Filipino intellectuals' quest for identity sympathetically and respectifully. At the same time, it does not preclude at all my various criticisms of the way cultural citizenship gets constituted through their projects; indeed my contribution might lie precisely in bringing cultural citizenship to the fore as a key social dimension of cultural memory (and of cultural intimacy, which strikes me as an allied concept, although Herzfeld's account is probably more "instrumentalist" than the memory theorists might allow).
• This neo-Freudian framework could also offer a very compelling direction for elaborating on the notion of the "survival," as a kind of memory trace that appears to promise Filipino seekers the means for filling in the absences central to their identity. The resonances of the term "survival" (like "superstition") is something I have not yet successfully tackled in my book. On this, the Dictionary of Psychanalysis entry on "cultural transmission" is helpful.
  

Diving In

Dived into the introduction, culling scrawled comments from the Writers Group session back in October. Started work on a new outline. First thing that struck me was that I need a new lead-in: given that pilgrimage is not a key theme in this book, I don't think it's a good idea for the very first paragraph to conjure an image of pilgrims swarming up the mountain. Instead, I made some notes about another possible lead-in involving an excerpt or summary of the 1850 manuscript by the parish priest of Lucban, Fr. Victoriano del Moral.

Whatever the lead-in ends up being, it has to touch upon my three key concepts: scale (or territoriality), superstition (or Catholic authority), and cultural citizenship.