 I hope you all ate beforehand because we're talking about food. So Hanna Kugana is a lecturer in liberal studies at NYU London. And yeah, she's going to talk about lechon. Resolve dreams of lechon. Civic education and swine line nationalism in the southern Philippines. Maybe it's in the desktop. So while we're waiting for Hanna to set up her presentation, I'd just like to make a couple of announcements. So I'm at Humboldt University in Berlin, and we have been running the platform, Philippine Studies Series in Berlin since 2014. So I encourage you to have a look at it. We're on Facebook. And also starting this month, no, last month, I'm heading the project advancing Philippine Studies at Humboldt University, similar to the project here at SOAS. And we will launch it on July 29 with a lecture by archaeologist Armand Nihares on the discovery of the homo luzonensis. This will be held at Humboldt University. And the last announcement is we are also convening, meaning our department at Humboldt University, the European Solidization Studies Conference, which will be held on September 10th to 13th. And I hope to see some of you again there. All right, Hanna. Well, I'd like to thank all the speakers on the panel I'm on because there's a lot of continuities, a lot of themes kind of coming back. Among them, U.S. vocational mentality, ethnicity in, well, ethnicity building. I'm just going to... Does everyone here? Yeah, and also this kind of racial discourse with the industrial school movement during the American period. So yeah, as I said, my paper will kind of touch on these things. But I think it's also going to talk about the Spanish period as well and not just focus on the Americans and then kind of try to see where it goes towards independence, Filipino independence. So I'll just start. This is a quote from... I start with a quote from the Bible. Philippines being very Christian. It seemed pretty apt. I took the little scroll from the angel's hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, you must prophecy again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings. Jose Rizal began writing a story in the 1880s about a hog earmarked for slaughter. Although he never finished it, most readers have now recognized the story's significance within the Rizal canon as a satirical allegory in which Spain's colonial project is called in question, and those subject to its tyranny are posed to prevail. Some have seen in its porky protagonist something of a Padre de Mazo or Sylvie, not least because Rizal scribbles on the last page outlining the opening premise of the Noly. Others have discussed the ailing animal community on the farm where the story takes place as a metaphor for 19th century society in the Philippine archipelago as a whole. But it also highlights a more deeply felt aspect of the colonial condition, speaking to the heart or rather the stomach of what it meant to be Filipino in an archipelago supposedly united by the dispersed institutions of Spanish and colonial rule. In this paper, I want to use Rizal's story to reflect on the uses and meanings of food and animal husbandry in the context of decolonization and nation-building to suggest that Rizal's gastropolitique contained within it a vital critique of post-colonial nationhood that has seldom been recognized. As a commentary on Spanish colonialism by highlighting the role of farms in food production, Rizal speaking to the complex power relations held in tension across the diverse archipelago of competing and overlapping traditions, both culinary and political. Thinking about pigs in particular not only opens up a social anthropology of Lichon in Philippine civic education broadly defined from the colonial period onwards, but more pertently for this conference shedding critical light on the Philippine's internal southern frontier between the Visayas and Mindanao. The discursive function of pigs in port in delineating what I call the swine line has not only shaped Philippine's nationalist identifications but concurrently elicits a frontier politics of colonial, neo-colonial expansion. Considering also Rizal's own partiality towards Mindanao, this paper will reconsider his cultural, culinary, and effective desire to include the region within a nation that might transcend its colonial inheritances and begin to envisage and enact new modes of cosmopolitan belonging. In Los Animales de Swan, Swan's Animals, Rizal's young narrator Dimas tells the story of a pig named Botioc. Castrated by Swan, a farm hen employed by Dimas' father, Botioc can sire no piglets before his inevitable demise, but he is nonetheless convinced of his superiority over the other animals on the farm, lording over them his impotence, a gift from their god Swan. The gluttonous potentate of his very own feast dye, Botioc demands extra food and fidelity in exchange for salvation that he claims only he can provide. Quote from the story, I, as Swan's chosen one, will lift you up, where you will live amid grains of rice for eternity. When an incredulous chick deans to challenge Botioc's version of reality, the grand carot, carot's followers rebuke him crying out false ideology, heretics, excommunication. Swan will condemn you to live in the pond, fearing the water, the baby foul falls silent. The story is particularly interesting, giving the explicit role of castration as a source of the pig's power and authority. In the Lacanian mode, castration poses both a threat and promise. In severing the colonized subject from the mother proto-culture, it promises instead the benefits of the father, a colonial culture. Botioc and Visayan is quite literally a parasitic imposter, a boutique, common intestinal worm whose credo is betoc, a sham, and festers like a betoc, a blister, on the societal body of the farm. The animal's edible devotion to the great pig is nevertheless understandable and escapable even, given the overwhelming allure of what Homi Baba calls the disavowal of difference. The animals accept Botioc's reign in spite of its perversions in order to alleviate the more immediate anxiety associated with lack and difference. Colonialism finds its ideal form when the animals of the farm police and repest themselves. Speaking through his alter ego Demas, the heir to wise king Solomon who abstained from eating pork, Resol appeals to all of the animals, all peoples that called the Philippine archipelago home, to break the cycle of cultural, religious, and intellectual emasculation. Under no illusions about the seduction of the Catholicism preached by the Coutinos, Resol cautions his domestic readers that to emancipate themselves from the hierarchical behemoths of the colonial farm, they must reconcile rather than deny their differences. They must do so on their own terms forming organic solidarities with each other therein. But it is to no avail in the face of the domination, domestication, and exploitation endemic to both this fictional farm and Resol's colonial imaginary. The story ends with the poultry's acquiescence in the pig's fetishism and we are left to conclude that all of the farm animals, castrated in the 122 years since Resol's own execution in 1896, the pigs maintain their hegemony. Votok's death and resurrection as Lachun are reenacted by Filipinos at home and abroad vindicating them on Christian feast days and daily life. Bonds of familial kinship and devotion to Southeast Asia's only self-avowed Catholic nation are simultaneously renewed around Lachun's centerpieces, quasi-secular altars to an imagined community articulated in a plethora of settings, ranging from the opulent fiesta, expatriate reunion and restaurant buffet, to the more mundane lunch counter, Lazy Susan and kitchen in the family home. Clean, drained, stuffed and secured, spit or oven roasted, while the entree varies from province to province, island to island, barangay to barangay, all of which claim to have the most pecan't Angpanaka Masarapnandochun, the basics remain the same as does the uniquely collectivizing nature of its preparation. Anyone can roast a chicken, but it takes a village to prepare Lachun. Although nowadays recipes call for smaller suckling pigs, symbolically Botiak is more intoxicating and international than ever. Revered yet unremarkable, the dish has come to define the archipelago's belonging to a wider post-colonial Christian world, alongside a secular gastronomic identity subject to a Francophilic hierarchy of taste. As an emissary of Philippine civilization, especially, Lachun raises broader questions over those amongst its denizens who do not partake in the ritual business of pigs. Just as the ongoing outbreak of African swine fever in Asia's traditional poor powerhouses of China and Vietnam promises to be an economic boon for the thus far unaffected Philippines, inhabitants of its southern provinces are apparently reminded of the imbalanced power relationships between metropol and periphery, or what Aryanapadurai is called as gastropolitics, the conflict or competition over specific cultural or economic resources as it emerges in social transactions around food. The Backyard Razors Association in Davao City, for example, have appealed to the Philippine government to explore the opportunity of Mindanao as an exporter of meat to other countries. Intuitively, this makes sense, given that Mindanao is home to nearly half of the country's 10.7 million Muslims who do not eat let alone meat. With regards to who benefits from this expansion of the pork industry, there is considerably more at stake. Both backyard operations and commercial pig farms are concentrated in parts of Mindanao where the Christian presence is more pronounced, and those known as morals do not stand to substantially benefit, whether directly by the way of money or indirectly through the education hog raising traditionally supports. The banks of Moro Autonomous Region illuminate the arc of pig production from Bukidnon to South Cotobato, penning the province's inhabitants with little choice penning the but to fight back. If we employ the swine line or lines rather as a mean by which to think through the multi-dimensional site that extends beyond Mindanao upwards through the archipelago and further still to the global north, a more gelatinous story emerges. Domestically, the curve around banks of Moro is very similar to the Bukidnon and the Mordechan and the Mordechan porous encompassing the Visayas, whose people make up the majority of Mindanao's Christian population. Their hostilities in Mindanao are also felt intensely if only because of the island group's proximity and therefore susceptibility to the fallout. The way heavily on the Visayan psyche which by virtue of its own cultural difference from the Minola metropole feels compelled to side with Tagalog compatriots on this particular issue. The fact that the Mordechan is the best pig ever, he's not merely putting Filipino food on the proverbial world culinary map. He's standing on the front of a conflict that threatens the nation's aspirations to global modernity from within along fatty fault lines from colonial and post-colonial Luzon to the Sulusi. From this vantage point, this is from the Boxer Codex, so if you... From this vantage point, Los Animales de Swan can be read as a parable about the antagonistic side of Philippine nation-building, the will of a regionally and linguistically diverse yet decidedly Christian majority exercised over Mindanao's inhabitants through culinary psychopolitics and neoliberal narratives of economic development. These narratives have roots in the archipelago's imperial history from Spain's global reconquista in the early modern period to the settler colonialism of the American Commonwealth. They've also been shaped by trends in global history, broader motors of change, which allied monolithic European vis-a-vis indigenous agency giving birth to and since remaking the modern world. PICS served in a colonial capacity in the Philippine archipelago imposing on extant ecosystems long before European contact. Hogs had traveled along with other fauna and flora and successive waves of Australasian migration between 4,000 and 4,500 years ago. Local inhabitants akin to Mesoamericans the Buccaneers of Hispaniola raised and hunted these pigs which took to the hinterlands. With Chinese envoys, merchants and mercenaries from the 19th century onwards came more pigs, a phenomenon that contributed to the entry of the Chinese word catae to slaughter for eating into the region's lexicon. The black baboy d'amon, wild pig was endemic by the time the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan arrived on the shores of the southern Philippines in 1521 with pigs of his own. As Claude Levy Strauss once said of the South American Peckery the so-called native Philippine pig constituted not only a zoological entity but also a social fact. In his famous account of Magellan's papal last voyage, the Venetian Antonio Pigafetta delineated the ritualistic role pigs played on the island of Cebu, how their value to the indios seemed to be less about sustenance or nutrition than about social hierarchies and gastronomic taboos. As suggested by the passing over of the Castile as local people called them in the ceremony Europeans did not have a place in this society a society to which women performed religious rites bridging the earthly and sacred worlds. In this respect Pigafetta and his Catholic compatriots were decidedly outsiders only by observing and documenting this community so alien to their own could they amass enough knowledge with the table. In other parts of Spain's empire conquistadors gave indigenous peoples little choice but to accept the introduction of the Iberian pig. Alfred Crosby described in his work on the Columbian exchange how poor, hungry Iberians delighted in the animals' transportability self-sufficiency and ability to breed in the new worlds. Of the locals' attitudes towards the old word pig, Benjamin Zedik has more recently asserted that because the Spanish prevented the natives from hunting cattle and horses, their turn to pig domestication was more the product of coercion. Similar dynamics emerged in the Philippine context where as Vanilla Canal has noted the systems of tax farming in comiendas, an exaction of tribute, labor corvettes and forced purchase of produce, Vanilla placed extremely heavy demands on the population. These systems were critical to Castile's colonial project in the south especially where according to Patricia Avanales and Donna Amaraso, the state's periodic requisitioning of food including hogs at lower than market rates financed frequent wars with the Muslims and with the Dutch. But this economic exploitation also relied heavily on local conversion to Christianity. Here the pig comes into its own as a digestible interlocutor between colonial and pre-existing notions of morality and morbidity, mortality and rebirth. Second perhaps only to the Eucharistic wafer, Lichon proved most effective in uniting and mobilizing the converted in service to the Spanish crown. And unlike other fixtures in Philippine cuisine, Lichon did not rely on foreign cooking methods or ingredients. It was already special. Often the only representatives of the crown on the ground, Iberian missionaries found it far easier if not imperative to reconfigure existing indigenous rituals like the pig blessing that Pigefeta witnessed in such a way as to instill Christian values of charity, justice and alms. But as Marcel Maus argued, the bestowal of these values was conditional on reciprocal sacrifice and obligation. The friars justified their demand for pork on Spade's behalf as a fair exchange for the gift of faith. What Magellan, his men and the Europeans reached their pale pigs to propagate the Philippine islands, thus transcended the material, signaling a seismic shift in the history of ideas and society across the archipelago. By the 19th century frontier opposition to subsequent colonial administrations and ecclesiastical orders played out through a politics articulated through pork. Whereas the Ifugao in the north continued to prevail upon the scrufa native pig in rituals of Catholicism and its agents, moral resistance in the south became increasingly associated with their pork of staining Muslim faith. In Mindanao, the pig's figurative role is both evangelist and executor, was particularly pronounced. As Spanish forces struggled to contain moral threats to coastal and maritime trade through conventional means of military force and religious conversion, they turned to myth-making so as to reduce communities over morals purported proclivities for slavery and savagery. The link of such traits to non-consumptioning control of certain foods had not manifested before to the degree it did under the Spanish. By Pigafetta's estimation, Hindu-sized rulers ate pigs less to distinguish themselves from the morals of Borneo than out of a greedy desire to keep them all for themselves. They did not force Muslims to eat pigs or bring them up in the country. Nor was Ignan Nation over moral enslavement of conquered non-Muslim peoples thought of solely on religious let alone gastro-religious grounds. By making this long-standing source of ecological trauma a matter of cultural contagion the Spanish were able to achieve what past invaders had not. Arguably, it was only by voicing pressure on this formerly self-contained universe through the new Christian rhetoric of the swine line that the Castilian blockades of hierarchical moral strongholds finally succeeded, allowing the Spanish to consolidate their rule over much but not all of the southern Philippines by the 1850s. When Spain ceded the Philippines at the conclusion of the Spanish-American war in 1898, the United States inherited Spanish methods for dealing with ongoing insurgencies from Mindanao to Luzon. In a particularly evocative scene from Henry Hathaway's 1939 film, The Real Glory, Lieutenant Canavan acts on the advice of a local Spanish friar forcing constable areas to watch as a fellow American and curiously British soldiers attempted to wrap a captured moral fighter in pigskin lying on the ground. Periding the mythology born out of the real-life exploits of General John Black Pershing in Mindanao, the scene is on the one hand reminiscent of Spanish-era propaganda about Moros. Their parasitic predation, subhuman savagery, and above all their superstitious fear of swine. On the other, it attests to the Anglo-American civilization of the Moros as a distinct homogenous group whose more primitive impulses could be tamed, and as Michael Hawkins has suggested repositioned with an evolutionary chronological spectrum affirming the possibilities of imperial tutelage. The granting of nominal independence from the United States in 1934, the Philippines first generation of internationally and locally trained civil servants, educators, and publishers set about devising a formal program of civic education for their fledgling nation. Food and foodstuffs would yet again play a key role. Under the watchful eye of colonial administrators, Thomasites, and venture capitalists, this Christian, Luzon-based, and educationally-oriented middle class promoted home economics as a means of instilling the archipelago's youth with a sense of national identity, both cultural and vocational in nature, which could in turn be put to use within the emerging American economy. By the 1950s, for example, the Abiva Publishing House's catalog features school textbooks teaching students how to make modern Filipino dishes to do arithmetic using native animals and produce, and to identify other natural resources that could be found and exploited in their home provinces. So these are just some of the covers of the stuff I've been looking at for this. In the spirit of the American small community, the Abiva Publishing House is focusing female entrepreneurs how to raise and butcher chickens and pigs. Alongside social studies, this is aspirational and yet also relatable home economics curriculum proved highly popular in primary and secondary schools, ensuring pork and food more generally became ingrained in the Philippine psyche. Absent from these and other instructional texts from the immediate post-colonial period, however, are the voices of those who do not know the Moros. It is concise and evasive, but reading between the lines we see the return of colonial era language describing these are quotes. The wrath and vending imparted on poor Barrio folks in Sulu by the Moros, enemies of their forebears. We observe the Philippine government continuing the American practice of bringing settlers to work as homesteaders in the uncultivated but rich Mendenau. We see the encouraging of people particularly in the south to like and feel proud of rural life in the face of poverty and sectarian violence. The 20th century correspondingly witnessed the suppression of Rizal's favorable view of the southern Philippines either through omission or reinterpretation. Another archetypal catechistic abeva title making friends with young Rizal focuses on parts of his European life while ignoring Rizal's formative exile in northern Mendenau in the 1890s. One can still visit the garden that Rizal planted in the Dapitan town plaza cut back into the shape of Mendenau to instruct local boys Christian, Lumod, or Muslim on the resources available to help their communities wean themselves off of the foreign goods peddled by Chinese merchants. As he advised the young women of Malolos one must always question one's faith. Analyze carefully the kind of religion taught you, then compare that religion with the pure religion of Christ and see if your Christianity is not like the milking animals or like the pig that is being fattened. Only then he argued could they as Filipinos hope to break free. When Rizal met his demise in Mendenau, yeah, Lunato Park a few years ago, his dream of a united archipelago died with him. As Baba asserted the modern nation is innately more rhetorical than the reason of state. More myth... Sorry, it's starting to get to me now. More mythological than ideology. Less homogenous than hegemony. Less centered than the citizen. More collective than the subject. More psychic than civility. Rizal did not even like pork. Yet in the face of the galvanizing allure of the nation, the epistemist polymath would always need to be recast and reborn the red-blooded martyr. The swine line no longer cuts across just the Philippines. It has gone global. While the US colonial administration never designated the Dapitan Mendenau map as Rizal National Park, it did bestow official recognition on another landscaped area at the southernmost tip of the island of Zamboanga. Wow, I totally mispronounced that. Sorry. Commemorating Pershing's military tenure in the region. Since the 9-11 attacks, the American right-wing blogosphere has lit up with praise for Pershing, the standard bearer of a homogeneous white nation crediting his alleged use of pig's blood bullets against Moros and Mendenau for not having been a single Muslim extremist attack anywhere in the world for the next 42 years. Even the current US president has indulged metaphorically in pig peddling this anti-Muslim mythology on the world stage and filling the cavity of his nation's public memory with its truth. But if we are to eat, or if we are what we eat, we are to become something else. Exploring the space between the interstitial and the intestinal is critical to any such undertaking because it forces us to look beyond easy narratives of religious extremism and glaring animal carcasses. If civil society persists in making a pig's ear of resolve's secular cause of polytism, we ought to think harder about the lines we draw on Lard, the colonialism we ingest and eating the book. That's it. Thank you.