 So, hi everybody. It's very, very nice to be here, especially on such a splendid sunny day, which you don't usually expect in London. Weather in London is a lot like the weather in Seattle. You're grateful for every bit of sun that you get. So, the whole idea of this masterclass, as Christina tried to explain to me, was to sort of focus on your work and interaction between me and you and you and one another, which I'm really, really looking forward to. And so, what I'd like to do today, as Christina suggested, is to sort of set the table for discussions later by saying a little bit about not so much where my work has been, but more like where it's going, because I've done that in the past. I've sort of done recaps of sort of autobiographical bits and pieces of my own intellectual formation. But for the last couple of years or so, I've been very much interested in looking at, among other things, the current situation in the Philippines today. So, I just want to say a little bit about that, and then we can open it up for questions and everybody else can do their thing. So, when Christina presented me with the title of what I was supposed to talk about, she said, oh, just talk about theoretical approaches. I said, what? I said, yeah, it's a little bit overblown, because the truth, I don't really do theory as such. I'm too much of a historian to just do theory. Instead, I tend not to live in the many mansions of theory, but rather I tend to occupy its slums and its back roads, its out-of-the-way places. And one such out-of-the-way place, of course, is the Philippines. Now, largely, I've been living in a house on the corner of Rodrigo de Tertes Street and Michelle Foucault Avenue. It's my friend, Lila Claudio, who Charmila, of course, also knows, and some of you might know him too. As my friend, Lila Claudio, once half facetiously said, Philippine studies lately has become synonymous with de Tertes studies. It seems that you can't talk about the Philippines these days without invariably. Being asked about de Tertes are forced to address current events. In my case, for the last couple of years, I've been doing something very odd, which is I've been teaching in the same quarter. I've been teaching, of course, on Filipino histories through doing a survey, online, by the way, if you're interested, and at the same time teaching a reading seminar on Foucault. Not surprisingly, the two have become entangled in my mind for better or worse. So whenever I try to make sense of Foucault, I tend to do so with reference to the Philippines or the United States, so that I call on the one to answer my questions about the other, much like dialing the number of a call center and asking impossible questions during all hours of the day. Somehow, Foucault's relentless focus on Europe, without, however, being Eurocentric, and this is one of the most interesting things about Foucault, is he looks at Europe, but he's never Eurocentric, at least in my opinion. It helps me see events in the Philippines in a certain way. Take, for example, the question of decolonization, which I know many of you have been involved with, at least from what Christina tells me. The history of Philippines studies with its roots in late 19th century efforts of Filipino nationalists to critique and eventually dispense with Spanish colonial rule can be understood as an exercise in decolonization. It's arguable that the moment you have Philippine studies, you have decolonization. Decolonization is the condition of possibility for having something called Philippine studies. As with the revolution itself, decolonization has had a long unfinished history. It has been marked by intractable contradictions, periodic victories, and recurring failures. The vast history of decolonizing Philippine studies alongside attempts at decolonizing the countries, perhaps symptomatic of other related processes. Insofar as it entails what Foucault might call the overthrow of imperial regimes of power and knowledge, decolonization also tends to retain, even as it seeks to transform colonial social relations by way of their nationalist articulations. In certain respects, decolonization in the Philippines and arguably in other parts of the world remained locked in the inherited ideas of state sovereignty, both in its absolutist and republican versions. It interrogates, even as it sustains, practices and disciplines and surveillance in the construction of norms of citizenship and the time and space of civic life. In other words, the problem with decolonization is the very temporality and the very space of decolonization is still colonial, right? And it can only be a decolonizing gestures are possible only within that continuously unfolding colonial space. Finally, decolonization in the Philippines and its nationalist and republican versions depends on capitalist development sustained by a particular method of governing that Foucault would later call biopolitics. Capitalist biopolitics, or we might think of as the state practice of national development, right? We know it as national development, but really it's capitalist biopolitics. Seeks to produce the economic and social conditions with which to care for the lives of its populations. At the same time, it seeks to ensure the privilege of some to accumulate property and profits in and through the exploitation of the labor of others. To this extent, decolonization also clings to the idea of a punitive state that is the power to kill or let die those it deems to be threats to Filipino society. This is the other side of biopower, what Achille Mbembe, among others, have referred to as necropower. Directly engaged with questions of letting live as well as giving life on the one hand and putting to death or letting die on the other hand, decolonization allows us to think about the history of the present with reference to Philippine studies as our attempts to understand the Duterte Regime. We give at least three examples, and I'm going to spend the rest of the time talking about these three examples. First example. In the 1973 lectures, gathered under the title of the Punitive Society, Foucault talks about the major forms of punitive tactics used in France and other places in Western Europe from the 16th century onwards. One of these included marking the body of the guilty. Foucault imposing on it a symbolic stain on his name meant to humiliate his character, damage his status in the system. The infraction is no longer something to be redressed, but rather something to be emphasized and fixed in a sort of monument, even if it is a scar, an amputation, or something involving shame or infamy. The idea of punishment as the monumentalization of the guilt is rather compelling image. The visible or social body must be a blazen of the penalties, and this blazen refers to two things. On the one hand, to the offense of which it has to be the visible and immediately recognizable trace. And on the other hand, to the power that imposed the penalty and that with this penalty has left a mark of its sovereignty on the tortured body. It is not just the offense that is visible on the scar or the amputation, it is the sovereign. Now anyone familiar with the last two years of the war and drugs will immediately recognize in this punitive tactic the workings of Operation Tokang, the process by which suspected drug users are placed on a list visited by the police and subsequently gunned down. The corpses left on the streets is gruesome reminders of their punitive crime and as the fearsome sign of the sovereign's power. As hallmarks of the drug war, extrajudicial killings entail a conversion of sorts. The impoverished Shabu addict is converted from citizen to social enemy. Its presence, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about this this kind of conversion from citizen to social enemy in a second. Its presence is then construed as an absolute menace to society. Beyond cure or rehabilitation, the addict is deemed inhuman and thus bereft of rights. The death of the addict is a way of marking its exclusion or rather the death of the addict is a way of marking the exclusion of a social enemy. But by being killed and put on display, the corpse is thereby made to speak about the power of the sovereign. To put it differently, the corpse is included by being excluded. Its death signals its crime and at the same time, it memorializes the power of the police. Extrajudicial killings are thus a kind of pedagogy meant to teach the living of the consequences of addiction and the fearsome consequences of offending the king. And of course it's very clear about this that punishment must outstrip the crime because the punishment is never just about injuring a particular kind of injury. The crime is always about injuring the sovereign himself. Therefore the sovereign must respond way beyond proportion of the crime. Now Foucault makes it a point of saying that increasingly since the 19th century, modern states have tended to shy away from the death penalty as a punitive strategy in favor of the rehabilitation and reform of the criminal. In other words, it's a prison to penitentiary and that move from prison to penitentiary is something that's historically been invented by the Quakers in Pennsylvania in the late 18th century. So in other words, it's a Christianization of crime that Foucault is tracing in the case of Western Europe. But in places like the United States, ironically where the idea of the penitentiary was invented, this is patently not the case. As the death penalty continues to be practiced and racialized imprisonment brings with it some voting rights, for example, discrimination in the job market and so on. In the Philippines, while the death penalty has been officially abolished, it continues to operate in the form of extrajudicial killings carried out by regular as well as private armies, death squads, vigilantes and the police. The deaths that have resulted from Operation Tokang, ranging from a low of 4,000 to a high of 20,000, have a long history. They were preceded, so in other words, I think part of the historical task is to emphasize extrajudicial killings and to emphasize the fact that extrajudicial killings have always been an integral part of state government from colonial to nationalist regimes. They were preceded by countless executions under colonial regimes of Spain, the United States and Japan, and all other post-colonial administrations. The gruesome display of dismembered remains of enemy bodies was standard practice. See, for example, the photographs of dead Filipino fighters during the Filipino-American War, the corpses of Sakta Listas in the 1930s, or those of the hooks, Muslim rebels, and NPA insurgents from the 1950s to the present. As the death penalty by other means, Operation Tokang continues the ritual of the ancient penalty of torturing and killing bodies of offenders, writing on them the nature of their guilt and the power of those who killed them. As I alluded to earlier, the killings are carefully planned, sustained by a technology of surveillance. Such a technology includes, for example, the making of lists of so-called drug personalities. These lists are put together by LGUs, that is, the local government units that include the Barangay Thanos or Village Security Forces, one of the most understudied institutions of Philippine society is the Barangay. I mean, really, it's very, very difficult to find really good ethnographic work on the Barangay, much less on the security apparatus that the Barangay is able to mobilize. So the lists are put together by LGUs, that is, local government units, that include the Barangay Thanos or Village Security Forces, appointed by the local Barangay head. The Barangays are given a quota of names of so-called drug personalities, suspected addicts and dealers, by the police. It is not clear how or even if these lists are vetted. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a number of those put on the list are not even involved in drugs, but are simply there to fill the quota. Such lists comprise the basic elements for organizing police operations directed at specific people in the community. They are then a kind of order of battle that allows the police with the aid of vigilante squads to organize the killings of specific targets. Additionally, the list of drug personalities becomes an avenue for financial gain, and this is very important. Sheila Coronel and others have amply documented that police are given substantial bonuses for each kill they produce. Vigilante squads writing in tandem on motorcycles are also outsourced and paid handsomely to help the police, some of whom moonlight as assassins themselves. Billions of pesos have been set aside by Congress for the presidential and police intelligence funds that can then be spent at each agency's discretion with no accountability, and these further provide the financial wherewithal for the kill bonuses. Alongside the financialization of the killings is the commodification of the corpses themselves. Hops get paid commissions by funeral parlors, some of which they own themselves, for each dead body they call in. Funeral parlors have seen a boom in their businesses. In the absence of a city morgue, all the dead are delivered to privately owned funeral homes where they are processed and cleaned. Each body can cost as much as 50,000 pesos to claim. To the families of the dead, the majority of whom are poor, this is a mind-boggling sum. To raise it, they must go in debt, but more commonly, they hold gambling sessions during wakes, where of course the house gets its cut. Hence, wakes no longer follow a set time period, nine days of viewing, for example, as was the previous custom. Now burials occur whenever enough money has been raised to cover expenses. Indeed, it is not uncommon for funeral parlors to recover some of the cost of processing the bodies by renting out the named corpses to households so that they could give legal cover for holding gambling sessions. Inasmuch as the law makes exception for gambling only in the case of funeral wakes. So sometimes you'll say, oh, it's a wake. They're just renting the body so they can have the gambling session. What we see then is that alongside necro power, as the power to kill that is understood to be neither murder nor sacrifice, there is also a necro economy. Marx once said that under capitalism, money is squeezed from every poor. Thanks to the drug lists we might add that this includes the bodies of both the living and the dead. The president himself is fond of brandishing such lists that can contain not just low level dealers and addicts, but also the names of suspected local officials such as mayors. While the poor addicts are killed, the more politically and financially well off are rarely touched, except in three spectacular cases, mostly to set as an example. For the most part, the mayors and governors including police officials who are supposedly on the list are left off and continue to be protected. The drug lists are the most important instruments of intimidation. They are weapons for striking fear among the poor and bridge alike. And the power of such lists come from the fact that they remain largely classified. No one knows for sure who are on the lists and there is no way one can get oneself off them even if one is found out to be innocent. To be in the drug list is thus to be guilty regardless of one's innocence. It is to live in perpetual fear that one's time might be coming up. The lists thus derive their power not only from their panoptic nature, they allow the police to see you without you being able to see them, but also from the way they reorganize temporality. Put on the list one can only be headed, not for redemption or rehabilitation, but for a final reckoning. In some the current practice of EJKs as realized through the tactics of Tokang are not a retrograde throwback to some feudal past, but part of a post-EDSA style of governing that has emerged since the overthrow of Marcos. It thrives in a setting where the legal system is profoundly politicized, courts are backed up and judges as well as police are badly paid while the majority of the population are poor. Given the financial incentives that accompany the killings, one can see how EJKs comprise a sort of necro-economy that is necessary for intensifying necro-power. Indeed, we can think of EJKs as its name implies, as a kind of violent arbitrary form of justice, extra-judicial. Yeah, the judicial part. A form of arbitrary form of justice in a place where justice is often delayed and diverted. Being aside the uncertain and time-consuming process of court trials and the difficult task of protecting human rights, EJKs insist on a different temporal and moral order, one where punishment is swift, visible, and unassailable. It is, of course, a justice that is steeped in injustice, one that is characteristic of the drug war and perhaps all wars. That's why it's possible for the administration to defend EJKs, because they say, what do you want? Drug addiction? Or you want to take care of the problem? If you want to take care of the problem and you want to go to the courts, it's going to take forever. This way, it's over, finished. The equivalent of this would be if you incur a traffic violation and then the cop comes, asks for your license and says, how are we going to do this? You can wait six months to get your license or you can give me something from my merienda and then we settle it. For him, that's justice. What you give him is not a bribe, it's a fee. And it's a fine. It's the fee and the fine. The fine that you would have paid anyway and the fee for speeding up the service. If that's not just, I don't know what is. So the argument goes. And you can see how this can be escalated and scaled up to apply to Tokang. Now, this brings me to my second example of what might be possible when thinking about the Philippines alongside Foucault. The matter of war itself, right? The drug war, the war part. Now, the tradition of liberal democracy in the Philippines like that in the West is fragile and daily. What are the most problematic aspects of liberal democracy is the notion that war and peace are two separate and distinguishable moments. Foucault has on many occasions pointed out the error of this way of thinking. War is not something that stops one's peace is established. Neither is war something that happens out there outside of society. It does not end when everyone decides to enter into a social contract and give up part of its sovereignty to a representative king or a representative body who can then make laws and adjudicate conflicts. Peace is not the natural state that succeeds war whereby laws guided by norms and rights are administered beyond politics. For Foucault, there is nothing beyond the political. And this is the limits in the debates around CJ Serrano. The sort of the co-warrento and so forth. The assumption of the critics is that law should be separate from politics. It's like, what utopian universe do you exist? Do you live in where you think that law and politics can be sufficiently and justifiably separated? It just doesn't happen. So for Foucault there is nothing beyond the political. Invoking closets against Hobbes and Locke, Foucault argues that war is politics by other means and politics is war by other means. Wherever you have power relations you have inequalities, oppressions and struggles that at times explode into armed uprisings and at other times manifest themselves in electoral campaigns, polemical tracks, social movements, dictatorships, coups and the myriad varieties of insubordinations. In short, inasmuch as social relations are constituted by variegated webs of power relations alongside the resistances they call forth, they always take on war-like nature. For Foucault unlike Marx, the war-like relations that pervade and infuse social relations are not simply based on class differences. Rather, class war is subsumed into a larger civil war, whereas class war imagined society is driven by a death struggle between those who own the means of production and those whose only possession is their labor power. The concept of civil war stresses the relational contingent nature of power relations. In civil wars what we see are intra-class linkages and alliances. Often these unfold as a series of factional rifts where rich and poor middle class and working class are allied against other similarly constructed factions reckoned less along ideological lines as on the axis of dynastic or familial affiliations. We see this for example in the cross-class alliances among the fiercest supporters of the president, the Duterte die-hard supporters or DTS a play on the Davao death squads that Duterte himself allegedly authorized. The DTS proclaimed children of Tatae or daddy Duterte and are made up of the aspirational middle class especially overseas Filipino workers old as well as new oligarchs supporters and family members of president Marcos Aquino, Ramos, Estrada and Macapagal Arroyo. They include the working classes and lumpens from the police to slum dwellers among whom come the great majority of the victims of the drug war. Such alliances are organized hierarchically as dispersed and mobile clusters of patron client ties and fungible personality cults that cultivate among its members aspirations of upward mobility as well as fears of becoming downwardly mobile. Such hopes and fears intend to generate intense fantasies of patriarchal order and dreams of an authoritarian utopia with which to protect its members from real or imagined threats. Now such threats of course are figured as social enemies. In civil wars class enemies are supplanted by social enemies. Those who pose an existential threat to society and who can come from any class the monstrous dictator for example his cannibalistic wife or the humanoid drug addict the immoral female senator and more recently the corrupt female chief of justice of the Supreme Court and so on. So in this context we can think of EDSA I and EDSA II as examples of civil war. So too with certain qualifications were the revolution of 1896 the Filipino American war, the war against Japan. All of these were less class wars as civil wars pitting Filipinos against other Filipinos from other classes who either resisted against or collaborated with colonial rulers. Duterte of course learned his political chops while serving as mayor of a factionalized Davao where civil war was the norm in the exception. And even before that he was a law student at San Beto college where as with all law schools fraternities under hyper masculine culture shaped Duterte's violent political outlook. Fraternities operate like gangs where neo-fights are brutally initiated and members taught to absolutely obey their masters and aspire to be absolute masters themselves through a combination of coercion and mutual aid. In some ways fraternities are breeding grounds for authoritarianism. As the mayor of Davao Duterte sought to co-opt the deadliest forces unleashed by president Corriaquino's vicious anti-communist campaign, the death squads as well as former members of the new people's army. Integrating these armed groups into the local police force Duterte controlled and commanded an impressive killing machine that carried out his bitting clearing Davao of both its lumpen criminal elements though not its largest drug dealers and smugglers including homeless children political foes and the occasional hostile journalist. Thanks to his war against crime and drugs Duterte Davao gained a reputation for safety and security however sort of spurious. Now since becoming president in 2016 Duterte sought to nationalize his style of governing rejecting the universalizing discourses of human rights for example he has put forth a kind of militant provincialism and apologetic parochialism as we saw he has also insisted on a sovereign prerogative to conduct a war on drugs free from foreign and Filipino criticism. While EJK's have been the most dramatic tactic in Duterte's civil war there is another tactic that I want to look at. In the time I have left I want to examine his tactic of joking and his use of obscenities in his speeches. Duterte is known by his supporters as the punisher. His punitive approach to governing includes telling jokes that disarm his audiences often reducing them to laughter as he names and shames his critics often foreign and female. It is a style developed while hosting what was in the most popular TV show in Davao which you can actually download from YouTube. It's all on YouTube. Giken samasa para samasa from the masses for the masses. While serving as mayor those who opposed Duterte have called him out on his use of obscenities and misogynistic remarks. But insofar as Duterte is concerned his sexual banter is yet another way of asserting his sovereignty. It enacts his freedom from the constraints of responsibility in norms of decency. Unrestrained he takes great delight in spewing profanities. He recounts body stories about masturbation. He jokes about rape. He publicly admires women's anatomy and makes references to vaginal odor and much more. In so doing he has shown that he will not be bound by the norms of decency or delicadasa as his opponents insist. Just as he refuses to abide by the laws of due process and the protection of human rights. Duterte, to put it crudely, doesn't give a fuck and has long ran out of fucks to give. To quote him directly tangina nyo that is you're all sons of bitches. For the president then, or you're all mother fuckers because that's how tangina really should translate as mother fuckers. For the president that part of his executive privilege includes the freedom to take pleasure in joking and shaming. Turning them into important weapons. That he manages to hit his targets is indicated in the anger he steers among his opponents and the endearment he generates from his supporters. Breaking from protocol and the conventions of respectability endows the president with a rebellious quality in the eyes of the DTS. It confirms to them that he is unlike anyone from the previous administration. As a bad boy who commends the room with his menacing charm, his flurry of invectives and sexual innuendos, Duterte seems excessive. It is precisely this excess that places him beyond convention and law, endowing him with power over those who are otherwise obligated to defer his authority. In his presence, they must observe proper behavior and attend to his authority while he himself seems to flaunt every rule. Herein lies one explanation, I think, for Duterte's continuing popularity. To his supporters, his coarse language and body humor are seen as forms of defying what has been prescribed by the establishment elites. His blasphemies directed at the Catholic church, for example, pointing out the corruption and perversion of the clergy, is often followed by hilarious retellings of the sexual abuse he suffered as a youth, literally in the hands of an American hero. For rather than paint himself as a victim, Duterte turns the story of abuse into a vehicle for ridiculing confession associating the ritual masturbation. After Duterte tells a story, you can never think of confession without thinking about masturbation. Similarly, Duterte has projected an image of himself as both a homophile and a homophile. During the presidential campaign of 2016, for example, he derided as opponent Mara Rojas' masculinity implying that he was too gay to be president. However, he also surrounded himself with LGBTQ supporters. At one point in his campaign, he had a remarkable interview on the TV show of the most popular trans entertainer in the country, Vice Ganda, where he lost no time flirting with her and confided that as a young man, he often thought that he could be gay. Furthermore, his administration has a number of visibly queer folks who count themselves as his most ardent supporters, such as Moka Usun, Argynieto and Sasot. Thus, when Duterte jokes and cusses, he engages in a form of dissipation, allowing his desires to surface and his impulses to take over. Breaking taboos, he surrenders to what is usually forbidden, something that children do but which adults are expected not to. He performs a kind of infantile regression, lashing out at his enemies and shaming them with delusions of their sexuality. Listening to his speeches, which are all online, by the way, if you want to and they're all transcribed. Listening to his speeches, which one delivered in front of local audiences, usually begin with the act of throwing away his prepared speech and appearing to speak off the cuff. One is plunged into shifting linguistic registers, polemical tyrants, abrupt beginnings and endings. In his speeches, he often sounds like someone who seems intoxicated by his ability to act out his intoxication. Foucault writes what he calls the two great illegalities that characterize the advent of the modern age and that threaten the newly dominant bourgeoisie in Europe, depredations and dissipations. The first was easier to police. Depredations consisting of such access piracy, smuggling and various other forms of property theft required stealth, calculation and circuits of distribution. In short, an organized economy and a political rationality. For this reason, depredations were easily codified as crimes by the 19th century while the bourgeoisie carved out all sorts of exceptions that would legalize their own predatory acts. Disappation, however, was a different matter. It was about indulging in excess and irrationality through drunkenness and intoxication and forbidden sexual relations. It also meant engaging in festivities, taking pleasure in games of chance such as gambling and various other activities that could not be transformed into profit. The dissipator was regarded as lazy, one who wasted time or better yet kept time to him or herself. This hoarding and wasting of time violated the capitalist demand that once surrendered to the disciplinary demands of production, which meant, above all, converting the time of life into the time of profit. By refusing to give into the tyranny of clock and calendar, dissipators came across as dangerous elements threatening the order of things. They were to be sequestered and trained in the army and schools and prison and factories where their bodies could be retooled from sites of pleasure into repositories of labor power. Duterte, in taking on the role of the dissipator in chief, thumbs his nose at all these bourgeois demands. He will not be disciplined. Instead, he becomes a sort of trickster figure who entertains by veiling his aggression with jokes and obscenities. As a trickster, Duterte plays the role of the payaso or the clown who is a staple character in the traditional comandia who made fun of those in power while tapping also into the Visayan figure of the Pugui, the idler and the vagrant associated with the lumpen or standby who literally sees things from below while sitting on his bum, for example at the Coroner Sarisari store calling out the pretensions to respectability of those that walk by. In assuming the role of the trickster Duterte converts dissipation into an instrument of power. His dissipatory behavior as a preemptive effect, he is able to criticize the authority of anyone who would dare criticize his authority. He steals, as it were, the comedic resources of his opponents preempting their playfulness and commanding the laughter of his supporters. These supporters in turn are drawn to Duterte's style of political engagement emulating it as a tactic for dealing with his critics by reducing the latter to caricatures ripe for vicious attacks. From cruel stereotyping, it is indeed a small step to declaring critics as social enemies. Here, and here just to finish up, hence the two aspects of Rodrigo Duterte's governing style. He is the sovereign who decides on the exception, setting aside law and putting certain groups to death. But he is also the trickster who, in disarming his critics, endears himself to his supporters as a dissipator par excellence, one whose excessive performance gives expression to what is at once forbidden yet desired. In the first case, he recruits the bodies of dead addicts into signs of his fearsome authority that brooks no limits. In the second case, he transforms himself into the embodiment of the dissipator who rejoices in his irreverence and irresponsibility. He thereby conjures the illusion of evading the time of capitalist capture and actively embraces the charges of stupidity leveled by his critics all the while, like the trickster knowing that he's the one who's really outsmarted them. The tactical advantage that Duterte enjoys at least for the moment, comes precisely from his ability to craft an impossible image, one that is both sovereign and trickster. In doing so, he assuages the fears of precarity and displacement among many of his supporters. Whether newly rich, aspiring middle classes, or working poor, they find themselves daily burdened by the pressures and humiliations brought about by the demand for discipline and conformity in a neo-liberal state, whether in the Philippines or in the case of OFWs among his strongest supporters abroad. Duterte's double image, what I'm tempted to call paraphrasing Ernest Kantorowicz's book on medieval kingship as the Dattu's two bodies. This speaks to the anxieties of his supporters who find themselves unable to escape from the temporal demands of capital, even as they seek security from those now deemed by Duterte to be their social enemies. It is as an authoritarian trickster, not an authoritarian populist, but an authoritarian trickster operating under the conditions of neo-liberal development that Duterte is able to consolidate his hold and pursue his civil war against all those who oppose him. As to how long and to what effect are questions best answered, no doubt, at another time. Thank you. We have time? Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You mean the double figure? Yeah. I was trying to work out that argument this morning because I thought about that too. And I think that this is why he needs to kill addicts. Because the addict is, in some ways, exactly that. The addict is the sovereign and the trickster. How is the addict sovereign? In his mind, the addict is sovereign because the addict is completely devoted to his or her addiction, to the point that they don't care about social conventions. All they want is to pursue their desire to get high. They will kill, they will rape, they will steal, they will do anything. In other words, they will kill themselves above the law. That's exactly what a sovereign does. For Duterte, he sees that as competition. That's my suspicion. He sees those kinds of figures as competition and, therefore, they must be killed. In killing them, he then appropriates ... he appropriates their power. And what is that power? It's a power connected with death. The problem is you can't really possess death the way you can and death has a kind of receding, infinite quality about it. So he needs to kill again. If this sounds like the zombie, I mean it is. It's sort of like the zombie sort of situation where the zombie is never content with killing just one person. He or she has to keep killing, right? And keep appropriating whatever power that person has. So I think this is why, if you read what he says about addicts, I mean, first of all, he addresses them as you. He never says, oh, all these addicts need to be. He always says, you have to watch yourself. You will be killed. You better stop. I mean, it's an IU relationship as it were. So he takes it very personally. And what that suggests to me, that the fact that he addresses them as a you, means that he sees himself as, in fact, interchangeable, a substitutable with addicts. The addict represents a kind of mirror image of himself, which isn't really too far-fetched when you think of the fact that Luthor to himself has been addicted to opioids, right? He himself is an addict. He himself has spoken openly about what a wonderful experience it is to be high. So he's not completely estranged. So I think that's where the question of the addict comes in and why he needs to keep killing them. Why he's obsessed with their deaths. It sounds like a bad movie script, but, and maybe it is. I don't know. Yes. Yeah. You know, I'm not sure how new it is. I suspect it's a lot more continuity than rupture between Aquino and Duterte. What's changed is the tone, right? And the visibility of the violence, but that all regimes are violent. All regimes engage in extra judicial killings of one sort or the other. For, you know, either greater rates or lesser rates. All regimes survive precisely in this combination of what I call refers to as bio power and necropower, right? And so in that sense, you know, because side by side with Duterte's sort of obsession with addicts is his commitment to development. So in that sense, he's not unlike other Philippine presidents, except he pivots towards China instead of the usual suspects like the EU and the United States. But his dependence on China is, in some ways, not that different from other presidents' dependence on the United States and the EU, right? It just, again, it comes across as something that seems different, in part because it flies in the face of deep-seated, anti-Chinese feelings among the Filipinos. Filipinos are very anti-Chinese. And so for them to see him now bodying up with China, you know, sort of rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but it's consistent with the sort of attempt of Duterte to appear to be unconventional, but in fact, his unconventionality is utterly conventional if seen in the long duray of post-war Philippine politics, right? So that would be my response to that. I mean, in other words, the question makes sense if in fact it is a different regime, but I'm not sure it is. Not sure it is. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, you know. I mean, critics of Duterte would get very pissed at me if I said that, right? But by the way, this is part of the challenge too. It's not just to criticize Duterte, but to criticize the critics of Duterte, right? Who seem fairly, especially in the Philippines, who seem very bound to what I think of as a sort of moral critique of Duterte. They think that by calling out Duterte as immoral, as bad person, as a murderer, violator of human rights, that's sufficient. But the other side of that is, as far as Duterte and his supporters are concerned, what they're doing is in fact, consistent with particular ethical outlook. That is to say, we're delivering justice, we're making you safe, we're providing security, what's your problem? Right, and if you criticize me, all you're doing is you're undermining me, and therefore you're undermining the country, and therefore you're essentially a subversive and you should be persecuted. It's just what he's done with Duley and my knowledge of other people, so yeah. Yeah. Strong man of sorts. Yeah, absolutely. And they are quite influential. This Shalegi sometimes is, like, he's an explicitly admitentist, and a lot of the critics met through this imagery on its head and go like, Duterte, you're basically Duterte Marcos essentially, right? So how does he negotiate and reconcile this, and still come out of looking like a sovereign leader anyway? Yeah, that's a good question. My guess is he doesn't lose any sleep over it. He doesn't, he doesn't, he does not give a fuck. It's as simple as that. They say, oh, you're being contradictory, you're a lapdog and blah, blah, blah. He doesn't care. You've never heard him, you've never heard him make an excuse for his fealty towards China. You've never heard him make an excuse about his closeness to the Marcos. You know, and in a way, that speaks to the sort of tactical advantage that he's managed to carve out, that he doesn't have to respond and doesn't have to take seriously his critics. And that's what annoys his critics to know. And because his critics, especially those in the elite, are so used to being taken seriously, right? They're so used to being able to speak on behalf of the nation. And all of a sudden, here's a whole chunk of the nation that says, we don't have to listen to you. You don't matter. And what are you gonna do? Oh, let's plan a coup. Ha, ha, ha. Give me a break. The Philippine military is not the Thai military. Thai military is very good at coups. Philippine military, uh-uh, zero. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's some really interesting work that's being done by, some of you might know him, Stefan Jensen, he's a Danish anthropologist who's based in Ahros, in fact, I'm gonna see him after this talk. And they've been doing all this really interesting ethnography of the police. And they're doing something very interesting that very few people have done, which is they've actually talked with the police, the individual, low-level patrolmen, and asked them, how do you do your work? How do you come to terms with it, and so forth. And they've sort of reconstructed what you might call an ethics of policing. You know, an ethics of policing which consists of saying that what they get is, precisely, it's not a bribe, it's a fee in exchange for a service, and it's a fine that they otherwise would have paid. So, for example, in particular, and much of their ethnographic work has been in Bagung Silang, which is a barangay of Commonwealth. And you know, it's like they have all these case studies, very interesting case studies, where there's this very telling one of a middle-class journalist. It's coming home, he's very tired. He runs and hits poor kid, you know, he's crossing the street from the slums. And the kid is seriously injured. So, you know, neighbors come, what's going on, they threaten him, police comes, breaks up, but could have been a nasty situation. He puts the kid and the mom, they go off, they go off to the hospital. And then he has to go back to the prison, he has to go back to the, what do you call it, the police station. But instead of putting him in prison, in the city jail where all the sort of riffraffs are, they see that he's got a car, he's, you know, middle-class. So they just let him kind of wander around and in exchange, as a sign of gratitude for the kind of liberties they've allowed him, he goes out buy some snacks, buy some cigarettes, and so forth. And so quickly, there's a kind of reciprocal relationship that's built up between the two of them, right? And then the next day, another cop comes and to make a long story short, they take him to the hospital, he sees the kid, the mother is, you know, sort of frantic because the kid is, you know, kind of in serious situation. And so they strike a deal thanks to the policeman where he pays the hospital bills of the kid, right? And then, and so the mom is happy with that. He goes back to the prison, and of course he's more than happy to pay the bribe, to pay the fee to the policeman, and they let him go, right? Justice is done. So what that suggests in a situation like that is what we think of as corruption and bribery is in fact sites for the expeditious administration of justice where reciprocal relations can be formed, negotiations can be hammered out, everybody comes away with something. The mother has money to pay for the hospital fees. The cops are paid off for facilitating that arrangement, keeping him out of prison and saving him from having to wait for going to trial, right? And so on and so forth. So these are all the different, and they have all these different stories where you're in and you go, oh okay, well in a situation where you have to wait six months to a year before your case can even come into trial, where judges, municipal judges for example, not only are they paid very low, but if you get appointed as a municipal judge in the Philippines, it takes at least six months before you get your first paycheck. Six months, what are you gonna do with six months, right? And so what looks like bribery, what looks like corruption are in fact sites for the administration of justice. But from another perspective, you would say, well that's the mafia theory of life, right? It is a gangster theory. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean it really is gangster, gangster. I mean this is Donald Trump, right? So but in the absence of other institutions, countervailing institutions, what are you gonna do? So what's the answer? The answer is to have these countervailing institutions that make these unnecessary, but how are you gonna get there? That's the problem. So in the meantime you got Duterte, and Duterte seems to embody precisely this sort of expeditious, extrajudicial as it were, delivery of services, of hope, of whatever, you know, so yeah. And I think that's why he's so popular, and unless you come to terms with that, it's very difficult to understand what's going on in the country right now. And then you historicize it. You historicize it and you realize, well it's coming from somewhere, it's not something that just happened when you got elected, you know. It has, it's an ongoing thing that probably was there from Kazan's time, and probably even before that, so. There was always a sympathetic president who liked to ask how the dynamics are currently between Duterte and Duterte. Yeah, yeah. Because unlike, for example, Indonesia or Latin America, the military has a more primary role. Yeah, yeah. In the Philippines, it's not in a sense in terms of how it goes in politics, but there is that underlying support. Yeah. It's never really, it's never really explicated because for some reason, I believe, it's kind of, the dynamics is still the same in terms of the dependencies, just the rearrangement. In terms of where Duterte, they are rearranging who the generals are, who allies with them. There's no investigation on that side of it. Yeah, yeah, I'm not as familiar with the situation in the military, except that people who know better than me claim that the military has changed. It's much more professional. It's still pro-American, in many cases, and they're still very suspicious of China. So that's a bone of contention between Duterte and the military. On the other hand, there is no taste for a coup. Absolutely none, as far as I can tell. So in that sense, and Duterte has gone out of his way to sort of placate and mollify the troops himself. One of the things, first things he did when he was elected was to visit all the different camps and to sort of hang out with them. So the troops themselves, the low-level soldiers, he's very popular with them, right? You mean with the police? No, no, no, the police, the police are all, I mean, they're golden, they're golden. I mean, there might be a trial, there might be a Senate hearing. There might be gestures towards suspending or punishing them, but they always get back. I mean, it's just those Kalo'okan cops that killed Kian. I mean, they're back, that guy, Marcos, who killed the mayor, he's back. So there are no consequences. Then he will occasionally sort of try to frighten certain cops or suppose, Lohot, for example, from Cebu, he's still there, right? So it's like, he talks a good game, but when it comes to those on top, he's not gonna touch them. I mean, the people, those cops who killed the Korean businessmen, they're still there. Nothing's really happened, right? No, but if you're the poor Shabu addict, forget it, right? So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think about your ideas with regards to character in terms of how he always ambitions himself as the sovereign, and in terms of how it's, how sovereignty is theorized, but through Carl Schmitt, where it's not really about who the law sovereignty is, the persona, or the object that is outside the law, who decides on the state of exception, when that matters, aren't you gonna agree? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He attacks himself in the way as a person is a populist. And also, during times of crisis, he is the sovereign that decides on the state of exception and he bodies them with his forces, but it's very powerful in the way in which he criticates with the power, like you directly think he is the sovereign that's the young culture, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, theorize and historicize, you know, so, so, so again, it, when he says that, you know, he's above the law, what he really means is he is the law, it's not that he's above the law, but he's above the law so that he can set the law, because he is himself the law, right? That's right, that's right. And so Congress will let him do it because, because he owns Congress. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and, and so, so in that sense, it's not, it's not so much about, I mean, there's certainly that, that Schmidtian, Schmidtian aspect of sovereignty that's at play there. But then, like I said, if you historicize this, if you historicize this, I mean, you can see this sort of playing itself out as far back as pre-colonial, I mean, arguably pre-colonial period with the Datus, right? And, and you can sort of think about it in, in terms of, you know, the tradition of absolute rule introduced by the Spanish king, right? I mean, if you read, if you read the laws of the Indies, I mean, it's very much sort of, sort of a discourse on, on absolutism, right? So, I mean, you can say that, that Spanish absolutism is still, is still part of the infrastructure of, of politics in the Philippines today, and the idea of the sovereign as he who takes exception is not exceptional at all, but in fact it's the rule. So, you know. But I think there was one, did you want to ask? I'm sorry what the last part was. Yeah, yeah, no, you know, you're absolutely right in the sense that the pattern, the pattern with Duterte is that he will not, he may threaten the big drug lords, but in the end he doesn't really do any, Peter Lim from Cebu, for example, is his good friend. And many others, they're all the stock about Paulo Duterte, his son, who is himself been, is supposedly actively involved in it right now, he's under investigation by the Ombudsman, right? So, his sister has sort of intimated that Duterte himself is involved. So, I mean, there's all these, and the thing is, you know, if I had more time, I would have wanted to sort of root this in the history of what so-called great economy in Mindanao, the illegal or great economy in Mindanao that people like Pancho Lara and various other people have written about. And it's a very interesting relationship between sort of illegal, the illegal and the legal, that in places like the Philippines and arguably anywhere, including the UK, right? That you can't talk about the legal without talking about the illegal, that the illegal and the legal are sort of dialectically related, one enabling the other, right? And that one can't really think about political power except in relation to this dialectical interplay between the legal and the illegal. So, you know, it's the idea of drug lords as part and parcel of the larger governing architecture of the Philippines, you know? I'll tell you another place where you can see this. It's the surge in the casino industry. So, all these casinos coming up, right? And it's a very interesting report that came out from these folks from Reuters once. Reuters reported saying that the casino, one of the reasons why casinos are so important is because, as you know, they're important places to launder money, right? A lot of the drug money gets laundered in casinos and there is a practice where much of the shabu is cooked in offshore ships by Chinese cooks, as it were, and then picked up by small bankas. And taken to the Philippines, very easy because of the archipelagic nature, so many different places where you could drop off the shabu. They're loaded onto vans. The vans are then driven to the parking lot of various casinos where they're parked beside an identical looking van filled with money. And they simply, I mean, it's like a bad movie. It's really a B movie, right? And then they simply exchange the keys. And then of course the money is laundered by the casino and no questions asked because, you know, they're not going to touch the casinos because they're an important sort of element in the tourist industry, right? So you have sort of this interesting constellation of drugs, casino, economy, tourism, politics. I mean, where do you start? Really, where do you start? If you begin to pull on the threads of one, the whole thing comes unraveled. The whole thing comes undone, right? So, I mean, it's very fascinating. But it's also, from a sort of, you know, political perspective, it's also very frustrating, but that's, you know, so we need better stories and better movies. Like I said, there's like a million and one movies that could be made from this. Anyway, I should stop and let other people talk. Right. Thank you very much for the introduction and good morning everyone. My name is Natalie Cobo and I'm a first year part-time. Can everyone hear me? Great. Also, do please just articulate if I start talking too quickly and it doesn't help. So my name is Natalie and I'm a first year part-time PhD student in history at the University of Oxford and my thesis is entitled Conversion, Ethnology and Law in the Early Modern Philippines. My background is in classics, but after completing my Masters, I became involved in a translation project through which I developed an interest in religious conversion in the early modern world, particularly within the context of the Spanish Empire. In the other part of my time, as it were, I work at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, where I'm translating Degobo de Natione, a legal treatise by the 17th century Spanish jurist Juan de Sorosino de Pereira from Latin into English and Spanish. This treatise, authored by the same man who helped compile the first collection of the laws pertaining to the Indies in the Spanish Empire, is the most detailed guide about how to govern Spain's overseas territories and the legal basis behind it all, for the Habsburg monarchy at the very least. It is the most comprehensive description of how colonial government is supposed to work in theory. I also work with a non-profit organisation, Neo Granelina, which digitises historical archives and libraries in Colombia with the intention of making the resulting images available online for free. This work has brought me into close contact with scholars of the New Kingdom of Granada, the area which roughly corresponds to modern day Colombia, working on a similar period to that which I am interested in. So this morning I would like to talk to you all about my PhD project, explaining the three main themes of my investigation, discussing the reasons why I am interested in them and why I think that they are worth exploring, and describing some of the sources that I intend to use to do so. I am very much looking forward to hearing your feedback afterwards, as I am very grateful for this wonderful opportunity really, to be attending this workshop with so many specialists of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. So broadly speaking, I am interested in understanding the processes involved in establishing Spanish colonial society in the Philippines, in analysing the impact that the conquest had on Filipino societies, and in thinking about what this reveals more broadly about the institutional framework and workings of the Spanish Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Philippines has never fitted easily into the historiography of the early modern Spanish Empire. Its distinct geography and the attendant differences, its distance from the crown, its comparatively late conquest and its large cosmopolitan population have separated it from Spanish territories in America and have isolated it from historiographical trends in Latin American scholarship. This separation was reinforced by its distinct trajectory following the expulsion of the Spanish at the end of the 19th century. However, I believe that it is important to examine these processes of conquest and colonisation within this broader context, thinking about other parts of the Spanish Empire, as well as Portuguese expansion in the area, to consider what the similarities and differences reveal about Iberian empires in this period. I believe that this will help contextualise the nature of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, really throwing into contrast those things that were distinct and trying to consider the reasons why they were so, which in turn enables us to think about what the Philippines reveals about the logics of Spanish imperialism. To do so, I intend to explore three main themes. Firstly, I shall look at how indigenous societies were understood by Spaniards. Secondly, I will examine how, regardless of how misconstrued these impressions were, Spaniards sought to change these societies to make them correspond to their understanding of civilised Catholic subjects and the extent to which change was affected, or at least perceived to have been affected. Finally, I would like to think about these processes in relation to other peripheral and under-resourced territories within the Spanish Empire and the broader Southeast Asian context. The first part of my research will examine how indigenous societies were understood by Spaniards. Missionary records, especially chronicles, have long been key sources for attempting to understand pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures, but there has been a tendency to cherry-pick information without considering the epistemological frameworks, particularly the use of classical models and contemporary templates for writing ethnologies which shaped them. By situating these texts within this broad intellectual framework, I intend to analyse the processes by which Europeans attempted to fit unfamiliar societies into an intelligible world view and to consider the homogenising effect that this had on the diverse societies of the Spanish Empire. I will also look at letters and reports written by laymen and the correspondence of missionaries to see if they reveal a different picture from these official chronicles. I shall read both sets of these sources alongside anthropological literature on the Philippines and Southeast Asia in an effort to reconstruct something of the indigenous logics which might have been at work and to indicate possible areas of incommensurability and misunderstanding. No matter how misconstrued, however, ethnological knowledge had a practical function because it was used to determine what needed to be changed in order to transform local people into the Spanish vision of civilised Catholic subjects. Having tried to determine the ways in which indigenous societies were perceived, the second part of my project will analyse the negotiation, which involved in establishing a colonial society in this distant under-resourced territory and to analyse the impact of the conquest by considering if and how it changed indigenous societies. I am particularly interested in the role of the Catholic Church in this process and the impact of evangelisation, the ways in which indigenous elites were incorporated into the colonial order and how Filipinos engaged with secular institutions. I will look at legislation and pragmatic literature, considering how these tried to establish societal norms and project a vision of what Spanish colonial society should be and examine how this theoretical framework of empire fared against the practical reality, looking in particular at instances of conflict that arose through violence or legal means to reflect on their causes and resolution. I intend to do so within a comparative framework, alongside the experience of other peripheral areas, such as the New Kingdom of Granada, to reflect upon the freedoms that marginal and under-resourced territories enjoyed to experiment and to assess how unique the Philippines really were within the Spanish Empire in this period. There has been a tendency to accept that the Philippines was particularly under-provisioned, but this has not been substantiated with comparison to other peripheral areas of the Spanish Empire and so I believe that there is room for clarification. I also believe that various circumstances of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines can help reveal something more fundamental about the nature and characteristics of the Spanish Empire. For example, I think that it is worth reconsidering why mining and other economic activities that were so important in America failed to take off in the Philippines, watched the repeated Spanish military attempts, but often failures, to gain territory in other parts of Ireland and mainland Asia signify, and whether a case can be made for entangled empires at this point of intersection between the Spanish and the Portuguese. So I would like to thank you all very much for listening to my presentation and I would ask you to please offer any criticisms, comments, advice, suggestions at all. I'm very grateful. Thank you so much. I'm very interested in that. I mean, I think, unfortunately, it is something that, at the moment, I'm only sort of glimpsing through the chronicles themselves, but there are particular incidents where you have entire villages absconding and sort of priest-writing backs saying, look, they think that we eat people and so they're not coming anywhere near us and they're moving away and I'm not sure how exactly, if it's possible to sort of move beyond these things, I don't know, sort of judicial proceedings perhaps, if there were any, would indicate sorts of impressions. I've been very interested in that and also the intersection of labour patterns that I suppose went into the construction, so obviously the sort of requisitioning labour, and then how that tied into existing patterns of labour within individual society, so labour to adapt to different officials and how they were able to make that work, and it seems like often there was a lot of contention about it. A few things that have struck me is to say I've been working quite closely with scholars of the New Kingdom of Granada, which was also quite a peripheral area up in the Northern Andes, and a few things that struck me. First it was when I was reading the classic felons, a hispanisation of the Philippines and he was relating the figures for missionaries who were there in a certain period and talking about how vastly inferior they were to Mexico, at a relatively similar period they were actually much higher than they were in the New Kingdom of Granada, which was a much larger territory. It sort of made me think that we need to look a little bit further. Also in terms of the printing press, again there was a very recent PhD thesis about the presses in Manila, and production was sort of measured again against Mexico, whereas there was a very sort of three-way sentence about still producing more books while producing titles than in Guatemala, so you sort of think that well there might be other places of comparison, but I think language has really been one of the things where I've been absolutely fascinated with, particularly in the context of the New Kingdom of Granada, which was, I wonder if in some ways a little similar because there were many languages in sort of just a few valleys. I mean it's terrain that's very broken by very deep mountain valleys and so there were lots of different languages, but there was a sort of a fiction that there was a general language from the very beginning and so people went and said, right there is one language and everyone is going to learn this, but of course the exams that the priests had to take showed that a different language was set for each area whilst maintaining this fiction that they were all speaking Moisca, which of course is something that you didn't have in the Philippines and also just the different trajectory of how Spanish took off I think within a couple of centuries, I think looking at census records most people, lots of people did speak Spanish, lots of these local languages disappeared and they identified themselves as just vecinos rather than anything else, which is quite a contrast with Professor Rafael's work in later periods where there was this sort of active hostility towards teaching Spanish by clerics who wanted to maintain their positions to local populations, so I think you just have this very varied response across different parts of the empire, depending on different officials, different circumstances and a whole range, a whole host of consequences but I think that by examining these a little bit more and by contrasting them and seeing why certain trajectories took root in some places and not in others, we can maybe develop a bit more of a concrete image of what exactly the Spanish enterprise is because I think it's a very nebulous concept and I think it's a lot more sort of, I think the legal treatise of how it works is a lot more sort of bluster and buffiner grafted onto the top of what was something quite chaotic and anarchic and very much in the hand of individuals at various levels In the Southeast Asian case, World War II, this strategy had its own concept of space where it was, you know, to us now who studied that kind of framework or in that sense it is entirely different. When the Spanish arrived the concept of space was inverted where the area of concentration areas of concentration were in and out the center of powers in that area going to the south, or in their case they have no countable geography, was kind of the center of power within the modern state and the Spanish arrived because of the Galilean trade, they based their operations in Manila because it's never to China where you can get silver and you can trade it also. I wonder if that comes into play and also in terms of literature, if it's in the frame of you mentioned the area of unintelligible societies and stuff, yeah, in commentaries as well categories used as well that needs to be analysed where they come from, what particular usages No thank you so much, that's a lot of wonderful conversations, thank you, I'm writing everything down that's brilliant. I think the space one is very interesting and I'm aware that throughout this entire talk I sort of grossly falling afoul of very sweeping generalisations and I think the space thing is very important because I think there has been a tendency in certain scholars in particular to talk about the Philippines in this very early period in a very generalised way but then what you find is that they're sort of taking information from all sorts of different groups, all sorts of different places and often across time so you get a very, I think a full sort of impression so as you can probably tell I'm still in my first year so I'm full of optimism and wanting to do everything but I'm very much aware that I think I imagine what will happen is I'll sort of start narrowing down and sort of focusing on a specific area or a few specific groups because I think that it is important to be specific about what you're talking about also just because the space concept I think is very interesting because lots of it seems to be fluid space you've got people travelling up and down and moving across and people moving across water and coming back and sort of you know large trading communities you have family connections and all these other things it's very fluid. The other thing I'd be very keen to do if I could learn it would be to create some good maps because the terrain is obviously, it's absolutely fascinating but there are lots of mountains, lots of islands, lots of you know points of where it's very difficult where on these sort of plain flat maps that you quite often get people can't get across and people can't make contact but they sort of make better sense when you can see a map and also the notion of the Spanish Empire as well it's sort of we have a very 19th century conception it just sort of colour the map in pink and it's all fine whereas really sort of thing especially in this period it was a much more nodal I mean you've got a few ink on the end doesn't you have a few different things and no I think that that is absolutely essential to be very sensitive to the fact that it's very easy to fall into sort of generalisations and make these few assumptions. On the second thing increments of ability I'm sort of starting to think a little bit about that I was I think because it's sort of been a bit of literature recently which has focused on continuities or sort of grafting on and letting structures continue but there's a lot of just points where I think this was entirely alien we sort of have two very different culture societies mindsets and when they meet they just they don't quite work and so I'm wondering if you can I know it's a very sort of dangerous thing but if I can start understanding some of the factors that might have been at play for example and the wolf wolf what we're told is frequent with sort of warfare between different groups so sort of trying to understand the logics of why these were happening because I think it might help also reveal why certain things happen with the Spanish for example the sort of patterns of savoury that were sort of happened and just decimated the desires and on a relatively annual basis but then of course the Spanish would send expeditions every few years to and so you do almost wonder if this sort of reciprocity is actually regenerate a sort of unconscious of the Spanish perhaps but sort of fitting into or taking over what were existing patterns before but sort of being slightly reformed I'm not really sure this is all very vague but I think it's trying to think a little bit about the bigger picture and try and understand a little bit how it might have looked from both sides as well as far as possible. Thank you I should definitely take a look into that. Yes, I'm familiar with Carolyn Britt. Yes, thank you. Brilliant, thank you so much. Wonderful, thank you. Wonderful, thank you so much. Yes. Wonderful, thank you. I'm particularly interested in lay chronicles I think because the missionary chronicles get a lot of information. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. The missionary chronicles get a lot of attention in part because they have a lot of this data whereas obviously more to get sort of appended in the final chapter but I think that there's also a manuscript chronicle in the Lilly Library which was written by what looks like a notary I think I've been told judging by the language at the very end of the 16th century so it's possibly one of the earlier ones and I think it's particularly important for sort of reframing how sort of the lived experience of the colonial society because when you're so concentrated on these missionary sources it's all about sort of travelling, it's all about working with local people whereas I think the layman's experience was just quite different and that does sort of I think help put into perspective a little bit missionary activities a little and I thank you. The tip of looking at the 19th century edition was brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening attentively and thank you so much for your comments and Chris. My name is Adrian Kahlo. I'm a recent master's graduate in SOAS and I plan to carry on further studies and this is one of my areas of research which I was handling when I was in SOAS. I'd like to talk about the politics of languages performance it's an examination of rigor deterrentist populist politics because there has been a recent explosion of the phenomenon defined as populism in many places in the world recently. In Europe we have, of course, UKIP, Corbyn, Greece, Syriza, in Spain for demos depend upon a alternative for Deutschland in Germany in North America of course and Donald Trump phenomenon to place. In Southeast Asia you can say that the recent triumph of Jokowi in Indonesia and further back Taksin, Tsinchinowata and Megawati were also a bit populist in the way they did their politics. But why do we call them populists really and are they populists versus non-populists? Is there clear definitions? What are the categories we should use to define whether they are populists or non-populists? So what are the aims of my study? It is to better understand the nature and dynamics of populism compared to contemporary politics it also aims to contribute to the growing literature of populism which is still very much shaky but it's growing and aims to investigate the role of language as a performative tool in style of representation and also offers a framework of analysis for future studies on populism. So to begin, what are the different ways in which populism can be conceptualized? How do we currently understand the phenomenon we call populism? Is it a form of discourse by, you know, like La Clow and Stavrikakis said? Is it an ideology? Is it a political style? Recent articles by Benjamin Mopat look at it as a performative style and representation. Is it representation? Or is it politics as Mu would say it's the actual heart of politics where there is a division between people and the elite of the class. But in studying it, I take the words of La Clow and to better understand populism in the states that there is populism it is helpful to veer away from normative debates about the content of this politics and focus on form and how it is organized. So what are the main characteristics of populism? One is it appears to a certain notion of a people and it articulates it. There is a concept of an othering of the elite, the ruling class might be the corrupt politicians the elite so to speak and there is always a response to a certain type of crisis like war and drugs or the corruption in the Philippines criminality in the Philippines in the Philippine context. But is there a clear definition of someone who is populist and not populist? In terms of people and the elite or horizontal, are there gradations? This is levels of populism 30% populist 40% populist. It is hard to do the gradations. In the Philippine context, were there populists prior to the death of course? You can say Magdassai was populist he opened Malpanyang House of the people he was first used to jingles and used movies to promote his personality. In a sense populist in his campaign as a war hero a decorated war hero although his medals were not really they were true at all. So in the start as well he created these movie roles what sort of a representation of the people in local politics you can see Muzwari's creation of the Morrow the concept of the Morrow from a heterogeneity from Islamic groups in the Philippines in the now he was able to generate more people against the imperialist elite in Erapa as a mayor yes he's a masa against the kind of phenomenal and inclusive local forays in San Juan the mayor of where he comes from and how about Duterte and Davao was he populist when he was in Davao? Well he wasn't really a quintessential populist he was a trapo, a traditional politician in Philippine political parlance he was a local big man he was inside the world inside John Seidel's words he was a local boss or a man of prowess in Southeast Asian political parlance he was a sign of political dynasty he was part of the anarchy of families as Mahoy would say in the Philippines so he was part of that superstructure of powerful families in the local context and also his rhetorical style even if it received a lot of response and actually in Mindanao it is the typical linguistic style of local sort what he's doing is actually found in any mayority or barangay candidacy campaign you can find in Agusan, in Davao in Bukit Non it is part and parcel of what they do and he also what happened with him compared to other other populists in the past he didn't follow the typical route where from local government executive branch you carry on to become congressman like senator congressman vice president and then some sort of higher post and then of course create alliances along the way and then have your presidential campaign win with him from mayority in span of six months and he wasn't even populist when he was there he was just a local politician with typical branch typical style but then it's not really that much detached from how they do politics in Mindanao so why was his political message easily transmitted from local to national and what are the factors contributing to this mid-air rise in span of six months he became a mayor of the candidate a mayor to a president so I'd like to propose the idea of the politics of language to his beside politics as a key factor so his language effectively frames his message changes come it can be regime change can be the cause of giving power to the outside of the peripheries forgotten it is through a political style a form of representation of his identity as messiah and also as a language and of course it's spoken in language in the tone of messiah the messiah people and how they do their language so it's very much representative of that so but how is this possible what are the operative features well messiah for a third it's not just language but the character it becomes a placeholder because it's such a it is a wide-ranging character there are caricatures of messiah in political parlance and in the way in which messiah is used in popular culture that he can get from he can actually borrow from and also it's also because of messiah language position in the linguistic hierarchies in the Philippines as well as its position in social economic hierarchies as a performative style he uses his politics of language to add historical power to this demands of change how because his language in reddit are very powerful in in pushing his agenda in war war drugs also adds force to his inductive criminals it gives sort of a legitimacy to this rebuke of corrupt politicians who control the language of power to further analyze this we need to have a kind of a preview of the linguistic landscapes in the Philippines there is a hierarchy of languages in the Philippines but it is a heterogeneous space messiah is the second largest number of speakers messiah as a language actually is it comes from seguano a place in the middle of the Philippines and it comes from the seguano language and because of the aspera it spread out throughout Mindanao as well as parts of messiah the messiah's island so it hence it got the name messiah because it became messiah language essentially seguano when attached of different vocabulary there are as I said there are constructions of messiah in Philippines where it's a language in the Philippines it's from the language from the province in messiah jokes it is if you want to be funny in shows in conversations if you perform the messiah language or the messiah accent it is a sort of funny joke messiah kumandai, messiah kumandung those kind of things permeate and sometimes the accent is a signifier for a lower social class lower social standing because of historical and material conditions it's language of asphyxiation and hootness it's fast cadence it's hard tone it's stiff vocal inflections perceives as unrefined and then among messiah speakers like myself I speak messiah but I also have a fourth language which is butwana which also has kind of it has a dynamic it's also very much very hard to deal with messiah among messiah speakers in Mindanao they used to turn messiah which is a pechardo term if you say messiah it's of a lower standing messiah na something like that so it's really for you to say that without batting an eyelash there's a certain power to it that actually is inert and it's hard to explain it needs to be analyzed and so in the context of these concepts of messiah we look at the the cause of language of power in the Philippines and I draw from the book of Bray Leto and of course Vince in terms of how he illustrates the power of colonial language as well as of domination and it's historically to historicize it through colonial language the imposition of Spanish language and American language it's very interesting and it's a reflection of relations of power in ideological linguistic and also social and economic so the linguistic hierarchies to explain through colonialism foreign languages were imposed to the Philippines who as on its own had a dynamic of different languages to actually to deal with so first the Spanish inhabited the Apex because of the Spanish colonization when after the Americans came in and they instituted the system of education they made American English primary language and then became the secondary language there wasn't an even linguistic relationship between imposed languages and the local vernacular children learned their vernacular they also as they were learning the language they were also learning imposed local languages and that's and like for those in Mindanao who have a third language they're learning Putuanon in my case and then Visaya because it's a spoken school and then Tagalog for movies and then English because we also study because there is kind of a a war of translation to power of business words in that regard and in terms of the whole infrastructure the conception of Filipino the Filipino revolutionaries it was all within the hierarchy of power in the linguistic last revolutionaries imagine the Filipino as an imaginary community through a lot of Tagalog stories through revolutionaries of the eight provinces in Manila so it was entirely steep in colonial power struggles and after after after after colonialism Tagalog replaced the colonial language as the apex in the linguistic hierarchy and to combine this with economic hierarchies Mindanao the case of Mindanao in southern Philippines per se it can be summed up by a quote from Ed Badema a Filipino economist in the Mindanao case this enigma is exacerbated by the effects of internal colonialism the transfer of wealth from the southern regions to the nucleus of economic and political power in the north so the Tagalog speakers of Mindanao maintain economic power they were at the top of the economic hierarchy and this was sorted in marginalization of Desai as well as other speakers in the southern peripheries the neo-colonial policies of the central government had disasters in neoliberal economic policies that actually decedited economies from the south as the government could argue and also hutchcraft and novellas of studies found out that the political economy of the Philippines was plagued by conditions of inequality from the onset, from the creation of the state through American civilization and prior to that through the friars and their rice plantations in different parts of the country in southern Indira for example in the Titus home island it only contributes to 80% of the GDP despite having the most natural resources so there is an economic and a linguistic aspect that underpins the kind of Visaya character that he tries to play the character in terms of the strictly in terms of the improvisation so he links this in terms of performance so he links the long antagonistic struggles against the Tagalog language it lends power to the use of Visaya as a bug with the tool it also enables him to effectively articulate strong anti-establishment capacity it easily translates Visaya as an umbrella language having, being sort of a lingua franca of its own in the southern part of the Philippines it translates towards if you are what I, if you are Manobo, if you are from Ilegan, from Cagayan, from Tausuk if you speak Magindanao Visaya is easier to it's very familiar because it is part of your your umbrella of linguistic tools and it's in terms of the formation of Visaya that it is that Visaya it is very much prevalent in that area it also is very familiar in terms of how it plays out in the social social structure of the Philippines side having its having its hierarchies as well that are entranced very much dynamic in its interrelations in the way so the disrupt, what the third is representation and its performance of this Visaya politics which is actually a disruption of the Galapagena in the national part of this course and it possibly it also has a possibility to disrupt material and economic hierarchies challenges the Galapagena power in a sense one of the elements Visaya is a catch phrase as I said it's an easy tool to use to form a people because it is so wide range I can be Visaya from some of them doubt about being Visaya but then immediately it can be just a performative tool so it's it's part of the the repertoire of improvisation that they deploy and also Visaya is a unsanitized rough version of Visaya it's not the statesman Visaya that some Visaya politicians would use it is the underbelly it is the gutter so it is very much a subaltern language that he tries to put forward in doing so it rearranges some sort of hierarchy in terms of the linguistic powers, power structure because instead of English and the Tagalog he actually code switches wherein he speaks in perfect English using his capabilities as a prosecutor and attorney when he was young and then afterwards when he switches to Visaya he goes straight and goes to the terrorist, a Serbian Visaya that he usually employs in his speeches so it is a code switch that has symbolic significance the unfiltering words it bears the identity of the masses to performance it translates to the language of the downtrodden through what La Clown would cause, change of equivalence meaning the chains are linked together in their shared antagonism materially in terms of economics, social standing and linguistically in terms of how they perverse and what sort of oppressions they get in society in terms of being Visaya a placeholder, being Waray, being Boduanon, being Dabaueno, being also having to deal with these herds so it can be an empty signifier it is a placeholder for a multitude of meanings so it links together a lot of things and it becomes a very powerful tool and it's not even a strategic in terms of how it plays out specifically in the Philippines it's not an overall strategy for the derby he has his own but then because of how it plays out and how he is Visaya and how Visaya played out in the hierarchy of economics and the hierarchy of language it lends powerful force where in six months it actually translated right away even in Tundoh even in the northern part of the country it requires much more research but there is some sort of transference that happens and in that regard it is very much uncommon how he grows right away so there are tactics to it bad manners of course and this meant that Kanthaboy attacked the men of the street he always when he was doing his sorties he always sits down with the back end of the chair in front of the gate with his white towel and he always reenacts Kanthaboy humor and Kanthaboy kind of behavior and also you know there is power in the language and these kinds of things creates sort of a force in terms of giving more power to how he forces his agenda in terms of the drug problem in terms of forcing criminals to prosecution in terms of handling corrupt Waiyo officials so it is part of the parlance of the tools that the report was that he creates for his agenda so to sum it up there are discursive elements of this because it constructs the people to challenge Tagalog and hegemony it has some power it symbolizes it represents this enfranchise vernacular speakers and peripheries it enables him to make a coherent and establish a coherence as a political force from an otherwise heterogeneous group of people and ideas and claims through chains of the golems and as well empty-seg divides the idea of code switching the strategy of code switching presents a way to destabilize linguistic as well as material highly recent Philippines in political discourse so in essence what I'm trying to do in my research is try to understand the ways in which language shows language and how it's performed and how it's conceptualized and historicizing it and theorizing it as well helps us understand populism in its many shapes and forms there are many types of content within popular strategies but we need to understand the form of it and how it operates in different timelines different political economies different histories it shows the specificities of how populism operates in varying social conditions and how it triggers this concept of conflation because it's represented in nature it is a performative tool how the idea of conflation happens in different eras in different contexts in the Philippine case it is conflation of material and linguistic hierarchies which just so happens is what the history of the Philippines or Mindanao tells us how does that idea of conflation take place in different eras of the world and how is it used as a tool it can be a good framework for analysis it introduces new methods when analyzing the terrorist populism and populism in general as Vince was saying in the Philippines they always go the normative route they always portray as a criminal, as killers as anti-humanized which is all it's true and it's very much a sad reality but in terms of him not giving up and him continuing with his agenda this is a different way of analyzing what are the dynamics that make him so powerful makes his message so prevalent so with many with populism taking many forms of information of the various societies of politics there's just how language effectively represents major traditions so that's my conclusion I'd be glad to get questions because I'm trying to build this for the research and maybe do a research a project that I can go do a few with thank you very much thank you for the question I've been thinking about it because my area of research is comparative politics looking at literature looking at how they do it the methods of comparison there are different levels as I told you, time, space in terms of ideology and it's hard, even to think about Duterte for example the easiest comparison would be someone like Trump, it's very hard it's easy surface comparison but it's totally different in Southeast Asia alone there are different ways to do the colors but then if you look at the economy if you look at theoretical frameworks by which they assess his form of populism it's at this point it's very ambitious but I would like to eventually because this was a master's thesis and I haven't done research of fieldwork yet so what I envision is go since being a besides speaker speaker of other languages in Mindanao I could pretty much pick apart I discuss this with some other colleagues to really look at how language plays and how that form of analysis can contribute eventually to the wider literature not just of comparative politics but with populism as well the definitions are very thin now there are different areas there are different stands they say it's discourse they say it's strategy they say it's just subterfuge it's discourse to create some sort of literature that we can base on I think this would be a good contribution to that which can be articulated for form of language so I was just wondering how does to articulate as an asylum and as a goal do they link together or how does he shape goals yeah that's also for me looking at his speeches and comparing it because I've also had first hand experience with how leaders such as himself in the Philippines in Mindanao do their campaign speeches and there is always an element of masculinity an element of being gugoy being kalobi whatever it is they call a boyish words behavior appeal to a stage but then as performance and representation it's two ways in a sense where there is a performer but then the audience themselves there are different types of receptions and it's hard to like I haven't studied him doing assorties in Dabao but I've witnessed certain other campaigns nearby of course Dabao is different it's a different history and composition of people and Dabao is different it's more of a heterogeneous idea Dabao actually because it is an area of the Aspera whereas in other areas of Mindanao we have ethnic communities establishing first and then creating an infrastructure state structure afterwards so it's hard but then you can see the vocal inflections and the style by which he performs these quotes it is very much cantaboy politics cantaboy rhetoric humor which also gives him a lot of significance and meaning but at this point it's hard to to delineate at this point because I haven't done the research it's early on and I don't even have the clear methodology because you can do it in a micro level you can do it in a macro level but I'm leading towards doing it on a micro level in a specific area in the Philippines in Mindanao but it's still under discussion yet thanks Brad so my question is all kind of how does it function how does it function very good question because I've been thinking about it for a long time because when you look at the surveys it's not a specific class his support is actually all levels class A, class B, class C and part of it you can say it is the underlying relations of power in the Philippines that's deeply entrenched and they will just shift or whoever is in power it will shift alliances will shift it is an interplay inter-elite contestation to say to Barb Harlan so it is that level where from La Casa New Zealand it became liberal party and now it's back but it's essentially the same political families and it's the same elite in Manila it's the same financiers, the same bankers so they will always if you look at it in a materialist frame they will always look to serve what's good for their interest so whoever is in power their agenda will easily become very much accepted if they are in power but that's a very easy way to compare but in terms of I'm still looking at the notion of transference and conflation, representation that idea it's very much what I'm thinking about but it's hard to theorize that and also historicize that as well because there are different languages in the Philippines they're attached to different histories and how they react I mean I have personal experience but it is contextualized within Mindanao but Philippines as a whole it's a group of multilingual speakers so they have different experiences but the level of transference would have to be due to certain material conditions relationships of power, the history of it but how it comes to be or how it appears would depend on the contextualization but there is some sort of transference and it has something to do with Visaya also as a placeholder it can be it can represent other subalterns or other oppressed because of the way in which it itself is kind of mirroring also of Tagalog in terms of how it transferred but the way it transferred to Visaya is totally different it's because of the asperg because of the spread, it's not through the domination and the strategies of voluminous power so there are a lot of factors to determine all I can do is just ask questions and maybe ask more questions afterwards because you can build on these kinds of discourses but it is a very good question there are a lot of factors to consider that's also because when I looked at the secondary education and all that I looked up I started that in terms of his code switching and how the underlying relationship between English and Filipino and then Visaya for him in the Philippines English is still the symbol of prestige if you are an eloquent English speaker it's much better than if you are eloquent in Tagalog but in terms of the hierarchy it's that global prestige in English and then in terms of his code switching I guess when he tries to symbolize the fact that he is a good English speaker but he doesn't need Tagalog to actually establish control over political discourse because his Visaya which he introduces it creates some sort of disruption but also if you look at it in terms of how Visaya see themselves in a midst of these hierarchies it's also a reassertion so it is a very integral part in terms of how English and Tagalog were dominant and then it will tell the story of how Visaya and as a placeholder for other vernacular speakers it is a form of disruption in terms of how they can probably reassert some sort of dominance that we already understand uses Tagalog yes actually because this whole argument is very interesting but it's utterly unconvincing because there are no examples no textual examples I mean he just produced a speech a particular speech I looked at it and it was really surprising about the third day which he has emerged to sort of give a new prominence to Visaya but on the other hand for the most part he shifts between English and Tagalog and Visaya will come in once in a while but even if it's Visaya's speeches he's talking to Visaya's audience that's the oddest part there is that contrary to your playing Visaya never becomes disruptive enough to sort of upset the linguistic narrative you could argue exactly the opposite what the third day is doing is actually reinforcing the linguistic narrative where he's privileged Tagalog is Visaya and he just used Visaya it's a starting point but when he starts it still reproduces the same hierarchy but when he speaks to Visaya and he's privileged as Visaya then Visaya takes office to have some alternate energy but there are also uses that Visaya ends up becoming reprimitualized that's also a good point so I mean in some ways you know my guess from my opinion anyway you have to seriously think every single bit of your argument yeah it's something that that's why it's ongoing in a sense because when I started it was during the campaign period it was sort of a critical juncture where in a limited amount of time such a thing happened but in terms of building from it I've also considered other because it's in terms of a political phenomena it's very much after taking power of course strategies change and then once populist rhetoric is combined with state power and military power it will always change so I've that's why it's yeah my suggestion it is a it is a it forces you to sort of think about it in a particular way but if you re-text from the problem it comes to the entirely unnecessary I mean it's such a cliché you know I understand the points entirely because even when you talk about populism among people who discuss it it is quite a thin level of categorizing political phenomena and what I was trying to do is just to frame it and then try to explain it in that general term what is the populism you require of the media what is the populism what constitutes the populism there are many many studies that we see on ours about populism but that would be for example what is what is it that makes up the populism and then how is the populism spoken about for example in Australia there is no word for populism in Australia exactly it's an English term so it's hard it's a hard to it's a very problematic term of populism but then again in fact the term is in English suggests that so the very notion of popular which is supposed to relate to the people themselves is an alien notion it uses there is a different underlying relationship in the in the local it doesn't even begin to capture the notions of popular from our parlance it's a good it's a good way to reassess this kind because as someone doing comparative politics I've been wanting to do more anthropological to carry the anthropological you know methods into understanding political phenomena which is especially in Southeast Asia is contextualized and it's specific and it's really based on what the conditions are in the on the ground so framing populism seems like a there is a disconnect in a sense but at the same time it's more of um creating methods of comparison you would say that it is kind of um yeah it's yeah yeah as a that's a good that's a good suggestion because that will reassess different conceptions of what popular is and yeah processes of popular is a historical process so you get away from the conceptions of notion yeah actually that's historical processes within and one last thing is the idea of making a claim about Messiah being somehow connected with some older or lower class that erases the whole history of class relations within Messiah society it's some of the wealthiest people in the country of Messiah yeah actually yeah and they're quite proud of it so how do you claim that the Messiah is keeping it exactly so that's also a very that's of what interesting the role of elites yeah they don't when they go to university in Manila they're fluent in English but they don't speak the gout because they speak straight besides that's a notion of like privilege notion of class different Messiah identities in terms of where they are in the economic structure also adapt differently in this kind of linguistic structure so it's a very it's a there are a lot of areas to really think about yeah fair enough okay good morning it's already past noon so I'm Rowena Palasios and I'm a second year PhD student at the Institute of Education which is right across the street and I'm doing my PhD in philosophy of education I'm actually looking at the work of Hannah Arendt who's a I'm actually looking at the work of Hannah Arendt who's a a literary German Jewish political thinker and I'm trying to draw from her thought a kind of philosophy of education based on the very few essays that she wrote about schools but also in the context of schools and the larger political community but what I'm going to present today is one small section of one chapter of that much larger project and it's the chapter where I'm actually engaging with Professor Raphael in the work as well as the work of other post-colonial and decolonial Philippine thinkers who've written about education so what I intend to do with this chapter and I'm really looking forward to your feedback because this is not my area of specialization but what I'm intent to do with this chapter is to bring Arendt's ideas on education into dialogue with the Philippine post-colonial and decolonial discourse about education from the 1950s to the 2000s and I'm already familiar with those debates for those of you that aren't I'll just give a very, very brief introduction so a lot of the debates about education in the Philippines have been about medium of instruction and language so from the time when the current educational system is really is something that developed from the public educational system which was created by the American colonial government during which English was the main medium of instruction and then over the decades there was some debate about whether it should be Filipino whether it should be mother tongue languages in terms of policy this actually led to a back and forth policy of switching from English to bilingualism etc etc right now the current policy is that the medium of instruction in the first three years is your mother tongue which could be one of the 100 and so and so languages in the Philippines supposedly but in practice I think only actually they actually only have I think 12 mother tongue languages which are currently which currently actually have instructional materials and then after the third year of primary school that's when people start shifting gradually to English and Filipino as the medium of instruction so because of the because of the short time that we have for this symposium what I'm going to present today is really just my proposed theoretical framework for analyzing the discourse about education and it's a framework that I that's in the title that I'm proposing and I hope you can give me feedback as to whether you think it's a good idea or not but I'm trying to create a kind of tripartite distinction among language adoption as where in languages there's Ergon, Energia and Esplay so my goal here is to try to use these concepts to categorize and analyze the presuppositions in the in the debate so when you have for example Renato Constantino for example writing about about why we shouldn't have English as a medium of instruction what are his presuppositions that he holds about what language is and what the purpose of language is so I came across languages Ergon and languages Energia in the context of reading about Hannah Arendt because of the book by Barbara Cassin who's a French philosopher who recently in 2014 published the French book Nostalgia When Are We Ever At Home it was translated into English in 2014 and this dichotomy is actually a dichotomy which if I'm not mistaken originally comes from Wilhelm von Humboldt I don't know how to pronounce his name okay but she uses it in a slightly different way and even though her appropriation of this idea is something which she doesn't really develop in great detail you can kind of draw out from the way that she engages with Arendt's texts what she means by this vocabulary, language as Ergon seems to refer to okay, language seen as a kind of externally imposed static totality so something that you have to learn the rules of what you have to learn so that you can use that language so from the very word Ergon which means function in ancient Greek philosophy the emphasis here is on a very instrumental view of language on the other hand Cassin talks about energy which is language when we are putting it into work so language where you already have enough mastery of it in order to be able to use it creatively and she uses this distinction to try to answer the question what does it mean to have a mother tongue okay so in the person of Hannah Arendt who was a polyglot so she, Arendt's original language is German but then she moved to Paris in the 1930s because of what was happening in Europe and then she fled to the United States during the war and she was a refugee in the United States until she was naturalized in the 1950s Arendt originally was writing in German and then for almost a decade had to write in French and speak in French and then in the United States she was writing and working in English but in an interview in a very famous interview in the 1960s a German journalist Gunther Gauss she was asked so what do you think of Germany do you still consider it your homeland and she goes no it's not my homeland but what remains she says the language remains and she begins to talk about how her mother's her homeland is the German language and so analyzing this interview can identify your homeland with a language what does it mean that you are at home when you are speaking a language and her Cassan's proposal is that it has to do with the mastery of the language so that if you master a language so well that you can be creative in that language you can actually create new ideas in that language such as Arendt she would think in German but then write in English then that is your mother tongue hey so I came across Barbara Cassan's ideas and I thought it was quite interesting but I also felt like it really resonated with my own experience of multilingualism where I do all of my academic work in English but emotionally I feel most connected to the Tagalog language and so I began to wonder whether that was really all there was to it to try to identify what a mother tongue was and it was actually Vince Raphael's essay I think originally published in Crédica Cultura which eventually became part of Motherless Tongues where I found I think an answer which resonated a lot more with my own experience and this was his essay where he talks about languages play so I was really struck and I'll quote you Professor Raphael with a paragraph wherein Vince describes what it must have been for a Filipino pupil to go to school during the American colonial period where he was banned from speaking in his vernacular and he had to learn English and learn subjects in English and so Raphael well Vince says coming to school meant leaving the home, stepping into a foreign space dominated by the other speech one left one's mother and mother tongue to stand before a foreign language one was exposed to the specific exacting demands of the foreign for several hours a day forced to conform one's body and voice to its commands and expectations submission to the rigors of English however was deemed a way of eventually mastering it confronting the other speech one was trained to conquer it to possess it and make it an integral part of oneself very picturesquely described languages ergon so something that whose rules are imposed upon you and which you have to which you now have to master so that you can master the language but after this description Vince now presents a counter narrative which is inspired by Nick Hawkins 1963 essay the language of the streets that analyzes Tagalog slang and Tagalog slang for those of you who aren't Tagalog speakers it draws heavily from colonial vocabulary so there are a lot of at the time more Spanish words now a lot of English loan words and Hawkins calls it a language that is an I'm quoting Nick Hawkins here created by the masses out in the open to express their lives to express their their times and just for the fun of it and this was the sentence that struck me to be a great language, because it's being created for the sheer joy of creating. Happy, happy lang. So in the essay, in Vince's essay, he cites long passages from Hawkins' essay, which are peppered humorously with Tagalog slang derived from English words. So Vince's analysis of Nick Hawkins' essay is that it challenges the hegemony of languages. So English is no longer this imperial language that has the power to banish the vernacular to the shadows. But here, there's more parity between the languages. So Tagalog speakers actually demonstrate their appreciation of the sound of the English language. Tagalog speakers liberally borrow from it, play with it, transform the meanings of English words, and then incorporate them into the vernacular. So just as a quick anecdote, my younger brother was born and raised in the United States, and he always gets a kick out of how English words are transformed into Tagalog slang. And the one that he loves the most, because he finds it the silliest, is when Filipinos say game na, which means let's go, right? And he finds it so interesting why game, so then he means go, or let's do it. And every time I say it, he just starts laughing. But I mean, we all have that, all of us who speak Tagalog have that experience of Tagalog and English really being friends, so that there's no, how would I say, strict delineation any longer between Tagalog and English. And you liberally borrow from English in a way that becomes almost unthinking. You aren't even conscious of it. So what I felt was that Vince's account of how a foreign language in this particular case is adopted and then adapted by a colonized people filled a gap in Kasan's work. Although Kasan does acknowledge the inventiveness of language, and she alludes to the ways in which individuals are able to reimagine meanings of individual foreign words, thus producing new meanings. However, both languages Ergon and languages Energia presume that language must be associated with work. So Energia actually has, Energia and Ergon, the two words actually have the same root, which has to do, which connotes work. Either the work of learning and using the language or the work of using language to produce new ideas. Moreover, Kasan's account still assumes that the boundaries between languages are largely fixed. There's a sentence where Kasan describes, I don't have the exact quote here, but she speaks of how a person must be able to speak at least two languages to know that he or she is speaking one. So at no point does she question the boundary between languages that the fine one is distinct from another. Therefore, I think that Rafael's presentation of Joaquin's analysis of slang introduces a third way to conceptualize language adoption, language as play. Rafael goes beyond Kasan's idea that language can be used creatively. For Joaquin and Rafael, language itself is the object of creativity. Language itself is not bound strictly by norms of correctness, so fluid is it that even the borders between language become permeable. An English word spills into the Tagalog lexicon. It's original meaning challenged and changed. It's original grammatical rules broken down in favor of the grammatical rules of a new language. I was struck specifically by this idea that in Joaquin's essay, the Tagalog slang is created not just for self-expression, but also for the sheer joy of creating it as well. And my intention is to relate this to Aaron's own tripartite distinction among labor work and action. So Hannah Arendt in her book, Human Condition, writes about three human activities. Labor, which is primarily the economic work that you do for biological survival. Work, which is the work that you do to create concrete objects. And action, which is the human activity that takes place among humans. Now, action, all those speech can be a part of all of those three activities. Speech has a special kinship with action. Action does not necessarily have any concrete output. You may have directed goals, you may direct your action towards goals, but there's no guarantee that you will actually achieve those goals. And action is limitless, it's infinite. The effects of action are like ripples when you throw a pebble in a pond, you can never know when the effects end. And so this image of speech, slang speech specifically, as being this non-instrumental play of words, I think there seems to be some kind of parallel with Aaron's understanding of speech in the context of action, which I'm hoping to explore further. So what I'm intending to do now with this tripartite distinction is to kind of look at these debates through the, in the past 60 years, about language and the medium of instruction in Philippine education, and use this as a kind of theoretical framework to understand what some of the presumptions that many of these writers were making. So in language instruction, as we all know, when you're learning a foreign language, the initial way that you're taught that language is really you have to follow the rules, so much so that in many Filipino schools until today, you are not allowed to speak in the vernacular, or you are fined if you speak in the vernacular. I don't know if any of the people who went to primary school in the Philippines, yes, yes. You have to pay 25 cent in some schools, not a lot, so it's awful, right? So language as Ergon really becomes this totality, right? This totality with its own rules is very foreign totality, which is forced upon you. And then of course, you graduate to learning how to write, learning creative writing, and then language becomes Energia, where language now becomes the way that you communicate your ideas. But at no point, at least in the basic education system, is language actually encouraged as play. And I think that it's actually in, well, specifically the discipline of philosophy that I'm most familiar with, where this idea of language as play has emerged. So in the history of Filipino philosophy, ever since, well, Father Raque Ferriolles in the 1960s began to do philosophy in Tagalog, and then actively created his own vocabularies and tried to use different Filipino words to express certain philosophical ideas. This kind of creativity about language and seeing language as something that you can actually create and continually create, that now has led to similar movements being done in other Philippine languages as well, still in the field of philosophy. So now you have a Ilocana philosophy movement. You have like a Bicolana philosophy movement, but all of them still are hinged upon this idea that in order to do philosophy in our vernacular, it involves this linguistic creativity, this playfulness with language. And so that's kind of where my thoughts are now. They're still a little bit unformed, and so I'm looking forward to hearing your comments, questions or feedback about it. Thank you. I haven't thought about that in a very disciplined way, but my impression just from stock knowledge is that they don't actually have as much power as they think they do. I mean, the Commission of the Week in Filipino, I remember when there was this attempt to change the orthography, to change the spelling of Filipino words in order to use the letter J more and the letter Q more and it did not take off at all. So I'm, I don't know how effective they actually are in terms of implementing their policies because I think language is always used, I think there's more power in the way that language is actually used rather than in whatever policies that they create. But again, that's a very undisciplined, non-academic opinion. So I might be completely wrong. Yes. The thick UP one, right? Yeah. Yeah. So playing this deeply in the mobile world rather than as in the case of walking in in the classroom below, like for example, did they try to translate the seven in some of our, the 17, the 17, the 78, the traditional dictionary of the seven in some of our, I think it tried to translate into a few disasters when you read the seven in some of our expansion. It's incredibly playful. There's just so many different voices to be tried to stand with as them. Yeah, exactly. I think it was scary. Do they want to, it's a bit, it's a bit like, you know, they want to learn proper. Yeah. That question carries so much about it. I mean, but everybody code switches, right? I mean, we speak differently in an academic setting than, you know, we would in, you know, when we're with our friends. And I think that, you know, teaching children that this is the code, for example, if you're applying for a job or this is the code in, you know, an academic setting doesn't preclude the fact, a kind of openness to recognizing also that you also do have codes, much more informal codes. And I think that maybe the problem might be banishing some codes and only allowing others, where as maybe a more playful approach to not just language instruction, but accepting, you know, different mediums of instruction within a school setting would be more open to the many different ways that people speak. And of course, this also is related to the mother tongue question because part of the debates about language has kind of been, you know, originally of you that English was colonial and then eventually of you that by Gallo is colonial. And yet, I think a more playful approach would be a more open approach, you know, an approach which recognizes not just, you know, that you can imagine a kind of parody of languages. Okay, maybe it's a fiction, but you kind of artificially imagine a parody of languages where, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right, yeah. The language is like the slang, the extra is that it's attached to the four precludes, this idea of, like, primary and secondary. It's not about, in narratives, what's so dangerous and powerful and so much potential about the parole in addition to this slang, so the English part of the language is that it doesn't say that you have a primary, secondary, and it's impossible to separate. Wow, thank you. No, Kassan doesn't talk about that and thank you for bringing that up and I'll definitely look at that a little bit more. Yeah, it might be really helpful. Thank you so much for that, yeah. Yeah, no, I hadn't thought about it. Thank you for that. I hadn't thought about kind of like the sociology of teaching and rules like having to pay a fine every time you speak English but that's really helpful. I think I will think about it a little bit more. I don't know how much of it I will actually go into the thesis but I'll definitely think about that, thank you. The thought occurred to me but I didn't pursue it. But yeah, actually when Nick Joaquin's essay he does talk about spoken language and he specifies that he's talking about spoken language. But, and I do wonder, because the example that I gave, for example, in Filipino philosophy where there is a much more playful approach to language that is actually written. I mean, these were written in books. Yeah, no, I haven't really thought about that but definitely that's something to think about, yeah. I don't know if this is, I don't know if there's any empirical basis for this but this is my own experience when I write in Filipino. I tend to write the way that I speak much more than in English where writing is a lot more artificial. I don't know whether, this is just me, but I do feel like when I'm writing in English it's a lot more artificial and I'm writing in an almost different register but when I'm writing an essay in Filipino it's really how I speak. That's, I don't know if it's just my own experience. One last ruby, Jay. Yeah, okay, yeah. No, yeah, I don't have an answer to that but definitely I do think that the play doesn't just come in the vocabulary and loan words per se but even in the way that you use the words and in the grammatical structures that you use. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Thanks everyone. Hello, hello, I'm Chase so I'm currently not a PhD student. I'm a master's student at the University of Oxford studying global and imperial history. So today I'd like to talk about my dissertation which is almost due so hopefully it won't be terrible but we'll see what happens. So today I'll be talking about one man, Manuel Godinio de Redia who was born approximately 1558 in Malacca in Portuguese Malacca and died in 1623 in Portuguese Goa. So Sanjay Subramaniam described him as one of the most, one of the oddest personages in the Portuguese Empire and I think this is very true because Redia was a kind of person who crossed many types of boundaries, cultural, geographic and racial as well. He was a mestizo so his father was a Portuguese soldier and his mother was a woman from the island of Sulawesi in the Malaya archipelago. She was either Bugis or Malay, we don't know. He was educated at an early age with the Jesuit missionaries in his home city of Malacca and at the age of 13 he traveled to Goa where he also enrolled in the Jesuit Seminary. He trained here for about 10 years and was steeped in the classics of Western education so philosophy, language, science, mathematics. So this was a very big impact on his life. However, after 10 years of training he did not become a missionary for many we don't know exactly why but he left and he dedicated the remainder of his life to the drafting but not publication and circulation of a variety of historical geographical treatises about the lands in which he had lived so especially the Malaya archipelago and especially India. So a radio kind of went under the radar for several centuries but he was rediscovered in the 19th century when he became entangled in a very eccentric debate of the time which was who were the first Europeans to discover Australia because this appeared in many of his works. More recent scholars have argued this is reductive of course as it kind of pigeonholes his work into categories of accuracy and inaccuracy. He was also involved in a second train of historiography which kind of really seized upon his status of being a mestizo and really reified his ingenuity without more critically thinking about how as a go-between he may have perhaps fabricated knowledge or how he may have used his mestizakhe as a kind of tool and also mitigated it as a liability so it wasn't just a default position. So I think that more recent literature has also critiqued this position and already is now studied as a complex producer of knowledge very emblematic of this period in which the Portuguese empire is just about to begin its era of decline in which the crown is still collecting information on its overseas territories but in which it's very reluctant to actually expand and perhaps conquer more. So I think he's very emblematic at this moment. So my citation is thinking about how I can build upon these recent trends in scholarship on Eredia and the scholarship on knowledge production of the Portuguese empire. Initially I became very interested in this idea of gender and I kind of wanted to fill the gap in a kind of facile way and think about how scholars hadn't thought about the gendering of his works. However, as I went on reading and reading more secondary literature I started realizing that gender was not just a gap that can be filled in his work. It was actually a core idea or concept that actually connected many of his other engagements with racial ideology, with Limpia de Sangre at the times with Puyo de Vlunstaches, with reproduction, with genealogy, with the production of science and also sometimes with women as characters, both mythical and historical that he was engaging with. So today I'd like to talk about one, my research into one of his works which is called The Declare Saan de Malacca, Indi-Murdial comma Caffe, so the description of Malacca, Southern India, which kind of is a vague idea of terror australis, south of Indonesia, and Caffe, or China. So in this text, which was dedicated to the king, it was drafted in 1613. It was intended to provide knowledge to facilitate imperial governance. So it was basically a description of Malacca and the kind of surrounding areas. So I'd like to think about how gender played a role in this work. How do I define gender? This is a big question. This is probably where I need the most help. I think it's important to think about how, in this period, especially when studying cross-cultural interaction, when we talk about gender as a category of analysis, which in which the agenda has been set by oftentimes European scholars in a European context, it's important to also consider that the status of men or women or the concepts of men or women may also have differed in another context in Southeast Asia. So I'm drawing upon the work of Barbara and Dyer here, which is very important. And thinking about when we use these words like men and women, we have to be very careful. I'm interested in how gender can be seen not only as a discursive ideology or a rhetorical construction, so thinking of Joan Waloch Scott, but also perhaps how we can think of it as a bodily experience thing, and a motive thing, a sexual thing, a performative thing. So drawing upon work for the 1990s, like Lyndall Roper and Judith Butler. I think this is very important as well when studying someone who's also self-fashioning his own identity. How does he deploy these gendered beings in his work? How does he understand the gendered body? And how does this inform his own identity? So overall, the general question I'm trying to address is just how does he deploy these gendered beings? What kind of roles do they play in his work? How does he go about doing this? So I've structured my dissertation to four parts, so I'd like to just go over them briefly as there's not very much time and perhaps you can comment on the structure. Instead of kind of looking at each individual section, which I think has been done quite prominently in the historiography, so kind of cherry-picking interesting quotations, what I've tried to do is think of the work as a holistic whole and think about gendered themes that kind of run through them through different sections with different characters and try to think of what they mean. So the first thing I'd like to look at is the idea of motherhood, of childbirth and pregnancy. I think the one thing which I mentioned in my abstract was very interesting. He describes the conversion narrative of his mother, who is of course the indigenous one, not his father, he's Portuguese, spends very little time on his father. In a society which dictated your status based on an idea of limpeza de sangre or in Spanish limpieza de sangre or purity of blood, it's very important to stress the piety of your ancestors, especially if they were new Christians, new converts. So I think he spends a lot of time constructing his mother, the reproducer of himself as a kind of very pious personages, personage, excuse me. I think as well, this is a very interesting construction because he talks about motherhood in a kind of inverted sense in other contexts. He talks about indigenous sorceresses and he spends a lot of time describing how they disrupt this kind of idea of motherhood, how they engage in practices of infanticide or killing children before baptism, which in a way is a kind of Christian discourse in this period as well. However, I think what's very interesting is he also relates this to Malay myths. So he talks about the Pontianash, which he calls, which in modern Bahasa Malaysia is a Pontianak and I had a very good conversation earlier about this. The idea of women who died in childbirth who'd become angry malevolent spirits. So I think what's very interesting is he's combining across these cross-cultural ideas of gender, bringing in ideas of witchcraft from the Malay context, ideas of ghostly stories, but also drawing on Christian narratives of perhaps witchcraft in Europe and the infanticide discourses that were happening there. So that's kind of the first section. The second section looks at ideas of sexuality and age, which I think is quite important because I think age is often left out in studies of gender. People often talk about men and women, but I think there's also categories within those, such as the widow figure or the young woman and all these sorts of things. So I'd like to look at how, again, he's kind of crossing cultural discourses. In some ways he's kind of an Orientalizing figure. He talks about the sensuality of the indigenous dancing girls, but at the same time he draws upon Malay myths of kind of widowed deities that live in the mountains and kind of engage in the sorcery-like activities and who also kind of lure men or take the figure of young women in order to lure men to them. So I think that sexuality plays a very large role in his work, although I think this is a slightly underdeveloped area in comparison to my other chapters. Thirdly, I'd like to look at his constructions of indigeneity. So this of course relates to what I was talking about with his mother earlier. It's very important, but I'd also like to think about ideas of masculinity, how we shouldn't think about men as a default position in that he constructs himself not only against these idolatrous witches or his mother against these idolatrous witches, but he also constructs himself against other men. So most notably, he constructs himself against other Malay men, so indigenous men. He talks about how they're not interested in intellectual pursuits, which is quite self-conscious because he's writing intellectual treatises at the time. There's a very interesting self-portrait which I wish I could show you, but I'm afraid I don't know if PowerPoint, perhaps in the break, I can show you. It's very interesting. This is where kind of Judith Butler comes in, the idea of performativity, of clothing, of how you perform masculinity. Because if you compare his self-portrait with his portrait of a Malay man, you can kind of see how he's distancing himself. He's dressing himself in European clothing. He has his hands on a globe, very mercator-esque, whereas the indigenous man is holding, well, he has a chris, a spear, very like indigenous ideas of masculinity in terms of, he's constructing it as a more violent, simplistic, almost barbaric masculinity. But I also want to nuance this by thinking about how indigenous itself is a complex category. He doesn't distinguish himself just against Islamised Malays, but also Aboriginal Malays who are still animist in the region. Today they're called Orang Asli, which is original people. But he refers them as Orang Bunua, so kind of the native people of the earth, the native people of the continent. And the thing is, he describes them in some ways as possessing more knowledge and more curiosity than the Malays, that sometimes they impart knowledge of herbs to the Malays, for example. And yet he also describes them as cannibalistic, like satyrs, very negative terminology. So I think he's defining his own knowledge production, not only through the reproduction through his mother against the sensuous indigenous women, but also against these men. So finally I'd like to consider one last category, which is this idea of healing, and I think it brings all these ideas together because he spends quite a lot of time describing botany, describing medicine, describing the plants that are used in medicine. And I think he constructs a dichotomy between on one side people who use herbs in the wrong way and people who use them in the right way. He describes female, indigenous, I suppose you could use the word midwives, I'm not exactly sure of the translation, or wet nurses, people who are using medicine for the benefit of other people. But he compares their knowledge that they use to such classical figures as Ptolemy and Gallon, which is a whole discourse that I'd like to talk about. But he also talks about people who use herbs in bad ways. So he goes back to the sorceresses and compares them not to Gallon, but to Cersei, the ancient figure in the Odyssey who changed all of the men of Odysseus, but not Odysseus, into swine, and how she did this using herbs and potions. So it's kind of thinking about these classical reference of gender as well. So I think healing brings these ideas together because it re-centers everything back on knowledge production. Who has the ability to produce knowledge? Is it indigenous women? Is it Eredia as an indigenous man who also produces a treatise on botany? And how can they be conceptualized, neutralized, presented as dangerous, presented as useful? So in conclusion, I think that gender in this way allows us to kind of access many of these threads across Eredia's work. It's not something that's peripheral. It's something that has turned out to be very central and allows a study of his work that cuts across. I think gender also allows this work to be positioned in a slightly more global context. So I'm aware of many of you are Philippine specialists. I'm afraid I'm not. So thinking about how in the wider Portuguese empire in this period, or even the wider Iberian empires, how was knowledge gendered? How is it produced? How are indigenous women, indigenous men represented by such authors? And I think most importantly, what is the role of mestizos, people of mixed race, a very prominent category in this period, in this context? What is their role in this process of knowledge production? Are they go-betweens? Are they people who embrace indigenous heritage? Or are they perhaps orientalists in disguise? So, thank you. Anything for us, Jack? As I told you, over the top. Because you're relating religion and gender and I think, I'm guessing it's the same as well in Malacca, but the indigenous religions have a very different kind of like gender, how would I put it, gender structure or gender hedgerow we compare it to, I think, Christianity, for example. And is that, I mean, are you going to the example that you do have indigenous priestesses, but you don't, for example, have a priest, right? So that's a very clear example of how the gender relations are very different than indigenous cultures. Do you have anything to say about that? Yes, that's very interesting. I think one way into this, is thinking about the category of the witch. I think it's the category of the witch, how do you translate it, Sorceress, Conor and Mantis, which is very prominent in both specifically Malayan culture and, of course, European culture in this period. But the ways they conceptualize them differently and similarly are very, very instructive. So thinking about her Malayan context, the figure is very much associated with this idea of fertility of indigenous religions and being able to haul upon magic in order to have children in the correct way. Which is why when it goes wrong, you want to have figures like the Pontian Ash or when a Mormon dies in the Talibah that's on rituals and making sure she doesn't become on these rituals. So in a way, one thing that impacts upon me is that the difference between a witch and a non-witch in the Malayan context, while gendered, is sometimes kind of difficult to quantify because there's this idea of kind of good magic, but it kind of slips in this European discourse into people are doing bad magic. Which is why we use distinguishes between the positive and the negative kind of healers. Are they really the same people in each society in a different way? The, I think the category of the witch in Europe is slightly different. I think it's slightly more, it's very much associated with kind of a pack with the devil in learned discourse. It's a very specific form. So you see this appear as well in a regular work in which he talks about how certain people are communicating with the devil. But the thing is this kind of ideology didn't necessarily exist in Malaya. It's almost like he's imposing his ideas of what he thinks the witch should be on the Malayan context. I talked to him about this a little coffee, but also the words he's using. So he, I think he struggles to kind of use these gender terminologies with witches because he draws upon Portuguese words like feiticeira, which is like a sorceress for bruca, like a witch. Kind of more associated with the devil or the pack. But he uses these words, which generally go to kind of living and breathing people. Like that's feiticeira, that's bruca. To describe the Pontianos as well, he says this is another type of sorceress. So I think, yes, it's important to consider the role of women in both contexts, but it's also important to read the sorceress through Eretia, the idea that he's kind of ridding both, but not quite. I don't know if that answers your question. Sorry, it's okay. It's really interesting, I didn't know that I'd have to talk to you more about that afterwards. No, yes, but I think it's quite interesting as well, he's kind of, I can't comment on that because I don't know that I'm in a hurry. But I think, I think what's happening is that he's taking these Malay myths and he's kind of Christianizing them to an extent. So Bert is an existing myth of the Leblon mullah, which I don't know if you're speaking of, but he then relates it to baptism as a kind of new thing that suddenly it's had to do with, oh, they kill the child before the baptism. This I don't think you need to conduct rituals but before the child is baptized. So I think in that sense, he's kind of relating the myth of Christian discourse. So I don't think that answers your question, but it's very interesting. The idea of the mestizo and the racial purity are based on religiosity. Did I give you a right? So, limqueza and sangria is very complex and of course there's the peninsula context in Liberia that changes as a challenge for Latin America that changes in the rights in Asia. There's actually one problem to find in the media, how do we talk about the same habit of the mestizo? But yes, so limqueza and sangria involves an elated, equal discourse of kind of impurity of blood, especially with relationship to Jewish people and orange people in the continent. This idea that if you convert Christianity, although you're kind of reborn in this congregancy of Videlian, this kind of congregation of the sacred, even though you've been baptized, which is the doctrine. It's this idea that you still kind of carry this tape of idolatry or heresy with me. So this is a very interesting discourse that evolves in the late medieval period, that evolves and kind of even forms the empire as well. And of course it evolves in Latin America, especially to a whole variety of caste labels, which are very interesting. I know less about it in the Saudi dating context. So what I'm trying to say is that in this context, if already his mother has converted, he constantly stresses the priority. He talks about the baptism and how it talks and then he justifies talking about the baptism, saying because she gave birth to me, therefore I can serve God and the king. It's very sort of sad and it's pretty awful. So it's this idea that he's constantly having to mitigate the fact that she was pagan. There's more pain. There's also a very interesting dynamic in that she came from Lactar, this is the way to be, which became, which was initially Christianized in the late 16th century or the 16th century, but actually became Muslim later on during the period of already his life. So I think there's an additional effort to which people would know about this. And there's this added concern that perhaps I really need to defend my piety more. It's this idea of piety and passed down through the past. Whether he was successful, we don't really know. This is not just a problematic and saddys age that also happens all over the world. There's a very well-known figure called Gauti Lasadela again, Marie, who is also a Tiso, the son of indigenous, incongruable woman of perhaps princess and a Spanish conquistador. And he also stresses the degree. He's also writing a very Christianized context stressing piety and that sort of thing. Sorry, that was a bit of a wrap-up. That's interesting, because the Mahon de Larasa sort of thing in the Philippines is very... But it's mostly based on race, rather than I mean the confusion of sort of... And there's the question to which there is a... Yeah, yeah. There's the question to which we can even call this race. Is it too early? I mean, the word Rasa does appear in the Romance language in this period, but to what the saddys mean, what we mean it now, is it very... So I'm conscious that when I use the word race, I have to be very careful. Which is, and in the moving of the context, I mean, it's very... There just comes back to a kind of cross-cultural idea of translation and comparison. So forgive me that I've forgotten the name of this very important author who wrote a study on fetishes on the West African coast, which is very interesting because the word fetish came from the kind of... Sorry, Portuguese? Yeah, yeah. So it comes from fetiso, it's kind of an ancient word, but the West African coast comes from fetiso, which is something you say there, and then that comes from the latter, the factisium. So it kind of manufactured it. You could tell me what it was. The factisium, like, manufactured or official name. So it's this idea that when the Europeans or the Portuguese arrived at the West African coast in the fort, the 15th century, to be in the 15th century, the word that they used to describe as a vast complexity of African religion and religious practice was kind of fetish, was witchcraft, they could say that. So I think that the words, when the Europeans arrived at various parts of the world, they agreed with them preconceived notions of what they expected to find. So they agreed with them this idea of witchcraft. When they see indigenous religious practice, they kind of apply it in that way. And this is why I think it's very interesting that he struggled, perhaps struggling because I can't see inside his head, but from the written evidence, he calls it that he's struggling to kind of categorize his Contiana. He's saying, are they another type of sorceress? Or there it goes. But yeah, he's trying to kind of relate it to the instance of categorization. I think this is also related as well to the kind of classical references he's using. He decided that he could draw on a vast variety of things he had written in his Jesuit education. So for example, when he sees a doctor, he decides to pair with the gallant, the kind of classical revived Greek figure that was very important in Renaissance medicine. When he sees a witch and he wants to kind of describe the sensuality or use of potions, he goes immediately to Cersei or Cohera as a kind of reference. So I think when you're only arriving in places, they're bringing notions of what they want to see. This came up in an OLO talk, but I think it's very difficult to think about, it's very difficult to think about indigenous Malays that are not already and not writing, actually conceived of their own practice and their own gender as a period, because there's very little written down. This is why I have a big problem that people consider irredidus as unproblematic indigenous figure, because he's believed not. He's very, very westernized. And while he does incorporate the lay words into his work, he also does incorporate almost a form of Catholic Orientalism, to use the word of Shabia and Tupac. So that's kind of a long-winded way of saying, you know, kids, brother and ideas. It's a kind of categorized what they saw, and they didn't necessarily matter to indigenous ones. Thank you very much. My presentation is basically about my PhD thesis. So I'm in my fourth year now, so I'm trying to consolidate my findings. And so I'm glad that Chase gave his talk before me, because I guess that's the same predicament I'm in. So how to bridge. So we're back. And like I was saying earlier, my presentation is basically an attempt to try to consolidate my findings for my PhD research and history, but basically stretches for over four centuries. So 1595 to 2013. So I've been having some issues with how to properly frame the different crises or adversity that people had to confront and for which identity or labels at least served as some sort of a rallying point for generating solidarity and overcoming these crises or hardships. So I am using Professor Rafael's notions, which he introduced in Contract and Colonialism. So listening as fishing. So the example of Padre Damos's sermon, which we will see examples of it actually happening at least in summer later. And remembering as hunting. So these heroes visiting Pedro Calosa in jail in Hawaii or wherever you went, trying to encourage him to form these associations to free the poor from oppression. And the role of stories, narratives, and not necessarily just the non-limitangere or other texts, which is important in Benedict Anderson's Imagine Communities, but stories, even bedtime stories that can have stories about the revolution, about the Balangiga massacre told to kids and it resonates across their lives. And the role of these personalities in history or in more recent history are people you know personally as examples of people have overcome crises and could serve as example for other new crises like Yolanda when they were dealing with World War II but somehow you could call upon their experiences for generating solidarity and overcoming this new crisis. So I'll be presenting some examples from these different periods. And again they play on words or in this case the word warai which as Adrian had explained is part of this Visayan umbrella but in our case it's not just the low-class uncouth meanings but also had this element of fursomeness or kilabutin tagalog, kilabutin warai warai or warai warai gang. So generated terror among people in Manila but in the case of Yolanda so they play around with these words and trying to say that we've overcome poverty we've overcome all these other difficulties and it's not just the word warai but older identities like pintados which as I argued in my abstract so we're imposed from outside the Spaniards, the painted ones or warai to refer to the migrants in Manila who were seeking kaupayan well-being or health but not finding their fortune and greeting each other. How are you warai? So that became a stereotype that these are the warai people who have no money, good for nothing people who engage in crime that find their fortune. So again you see these coming back again after Yolanda we've overcome poverty so you can overcome that, you can overcome this. And also other historical examples like the social movements and anti-Japanese resistance in World War II even though again we go back to the fictive element of local folk history where we fought World War II but Tacloban was actually not the center of resistance it was the capital and was therefore a collaborator town but still they play with history, localize history to try to say that they did this before. But when I interviewed the guy who did this sign more he actually said that he had more he had took 400 years of under his spanish but his paint was washed away so he had to settle it a few words. And then back to the selective appropriation of labels where Pintados where it can denote savages for some Spaniards to the natives so it denoted their ferocity so this was a more ancient notion a self-image they had for some reason they kept attaching to these new words which was applied to them negatively but for them was still meaningful in the face of these new emergencies or adversities so same descriptions by different observers so one a Italian traveler who happened to pass by in summer late in 1697 and a Samaranio priest when describing how the warai linguistic label came to be applied to migrants to Manila in the post-war period where the warai warai terminology came emerged and it's not just local history but also local values and the guy who did the we fought in World War II billboard he had a son who was also doing art and was part of this local group of street artists inspired by Banksy but he revealed that it was him who had triggered what his father did and the father got all the publicity in the international media but he was saying yeah I did it and the media kept asking for who did this and the father was being approached by these media personalities so he started to create these billboards to assist in the recovery process through these different messages but I just rediscovered this recently and it turned out that the symbols he had corresponded with the three concepts I was dealing with in my research so you had the crisis whether it was war or disaster or epidemic disease and unity which was had a deeper meaning and shaped by history by slave raids by the apocalypse when the Spanish or the missionaries introduced the messianic time and the end of the world and now with Yolanda and resilience so that became observed as well and Kaupaya which as Chase mentioned about healing and in this case the millenarian movements who continued to resist the Americans were fighting for village independence rather than national independence and the elites had surrendered they were trying to consolidate American rule but the Americans were surprised why do these villages keep resisting and joining these local popes and these leaders were usually healers although no longer the Baba Ilan so again the gendered element from early Baba Ilan resistance so effeminate male resistance and then by the revolution mostly male healers who were resisting colonial rule or getting rid of the disease of colonialism so contracting colonialism so how do you heal yourself from colonialism you join these healers who were trying to heal society by ousting the Spaniards from the Philippines and later the Americans and again the personality spoke heroes where after the arrival of the Americans they were being taught in schools but again appropriated locally so they appear in these local folk songs where again like the Kalosa episode heroes returning in other forms or still seeking true independence or to finish the unfinished revolution and how they were transmitted so not only in schools or through sermons but also through bedtime stories or female oriented oral traditions bedtime stories, folk songs which people associated with family with community a local form of nationalism I suppose and again where does the iso self-image come from so it goes much deeper to legends like the local Bernardo Carpio so in the summer later it's the Makandog family they don't really have a name it's just a description Makandog or Murong Morong and according to Alcina in 1668 which is Tolga and Fogg or Sclauds but those were their ancestors and it's still part of the stories and as can be seen in this article about the Suluwan women who lighted up their communities after Yolanda still the narratives handed down through tradition and not necessarily in history books so some conclusions so again the interplay of outsider stereotypes versus positive stereotypes selective appropriation against adversity so promotion of older mutual aid or collective traits or values and again historical context changing context but same values and different modes of transmission oral radio now Facebook and in pursuit of Kaupaya which was the last triangle pointing up so freedom, salvation, or health, well-being so any inputs would be appreciated thank you it's debated and again contested because we don't really have a specific fixed term like Tagalog or Visaya so it's sometimes called summer-later Visayan or Linae to Samaranon or Warai so that's our problem we don't have a fixed name because when you say Warai it denotes people without anything so the elites would back off from some Linae to Samaranon some are Latae Visayan or all these other contrived names but all the other people they just stick to Warai because yeah that's us we're struggling against poverty so in Facebook you always see these debates coming up every few months they're never ending debates we don't have a fixed term because I argued all these crises slavery and accidents of history so I don't think we can have one because we have all these histories still being transmitted by in stories and songs in history books hopefully so there's also the debate was it Limasawa tied up with different Visayan identities I suppose and then the history element similar language different experiences I suppose so I'm arguing that some of it can come from school so how would they know about Del Pilara for instance although there would be that used the use of site Burgos so I suppose it was through the sermons that the priests were denouncing these guys Rizal as a German spy but then they were imagining a German ship coming to free the Visayas from the Spaniards so fishing for meanings some of it a lot of it but it's also the oral tradition which is still quite strong so for instance about Balangiga there'd be books written about it but there'd also be the folk song where you and Balangiga burned for seven years it burned but the smoke was never seen it's a very evocative imagery and very metaphorical but people are still singing it or dancing the curat sir but yeah it's still a quite strong event and it resonates with the song so historians might be writing about it but locally they have this local imagination of what happened we're bringing back the Americans especially after Yolanda that's where you see a reference to Bajau hoping to get the relief goods or the NPAs so there was a Philippine flag in Palo and they saw it as a communist flag and my brother was like but it's a Philippine flag but people were interpreting it as the NPAs coming down from the mountains to get the relief goods or prisoners going to rape and pillage in the homes so that was their notion of otherness the marginalized the ethnic minorities or the communists from the countryside at least from a Tacloban perspective alright, alright thank you my name is Charmila I'm in my second year in gender studies I'm doing my PhD at the University of Cambridge so just a quick background I used to work in anti-trafficking and that's when I was inspired to do this PhD I'll just like get the definitional stuff out of the way so there is a very technical legal definitional trafficking which is like I'll give you a very condensed version an act that may involve recruiting, paying for harboring, transporting or maintaining a person using any of the following means like fraud, coercion, abuse of their vulnerability abuse of your power for purposes of exploitation exploitation can be exploitation of their labor sexual exploitation selling their organs, right this is a loose definition at this rate so I used to work in anti-trafficking and I made some observations about sex trafficking in particular and what knowledge claims were being made about sex workers so I use sex workers because I also have specific ideological commitments like I do think sex work is work this is in itself a debate this whole linguistic framing of it some people will argue that I'm wrong and I should be using women in prostitution so a lot of radical feminists take this position the neutral term is prostitutes which I may also like transition into because they are interchangeable so just getting those definitions out of the way now what I'm examining in my dissertation is what are the knowledge claims being made by the the Philippine anti-trafficking industry about prostitutes and sex workers how are those knowledge claims produced and negotiated so who gets to speak who doesn't get to speak what are the resulting policy implications of these knowledge claims which have commonly been raids, rescue operations and sheltering sex workers who have been rescued and how do these conceptions square with the lived realities of sex workers themselves I guess if I would situate this this is really more like policy studies but a bit more critical so a lot of my research methods included speaking to sex workers themselves and asking them those who are subjected to state interventions asking them about these encounters with the states with the police, with healthcare officials the gist is are you better off as a result of being sheltered as a result of the raids and as a result of the rescue operations and asking them about the nature of their work and comparing data from these interviews with what official discourse says about this vulnerable population it's a work in progress and it's really really messy and I am currently drowning in interview data but some observations I think that you might be able to help me work through are I do want to historicize sex work in the Philippines a bit more and I think this is a weak spot of the project I know that there have been a lot of colonial interventions that involve the policing of women's sexuality and imposing like more western frameworks and gender relationships because the Carolyn Brewer text that I was referencing earlier talks about much more loose and free conception of female sexuality and historical antecedents to prostitution as we know it now so that's one thing that I would like to do better for this to show that our conception of trafficking was an historical like this is a political process this was influenced heavily by other actors second interesting thing is that the popular depictions of sex work or prostitution in the Philippines always involve like a caricature of a local innocent woman being exploited by a foreign man there is very little mention of especially for talking about adult women as a local clientele so it's always framed as a asymmetrical colonial encounter and I mean I imagine there is something there in terms of how the nation is conceived as a body of a woman that's being defiled but these are all very loose thoughts this is the aspect of the pieces I haven't really engaged with yet because I've been with on the interview side so any thoughts you have will be appreciated that's really it so I haven't referenced for this yet I'm taking notes he has a nice little essay on which is quite interesting on the growth of sex work during the filming of America he shows at the same time that you had all these American troops coming in every sign of pain has been a whole bunch of prostitutes coming in a life of Europe and then the displacement of local women as a result of war coming through and how that for a while there was a period where there was sort of easy commerce between the displacement of soldiers and the prostitutes until the women temperance movement in the United States heard about it because some stories went back to the United States of houses being used for prostitution and so there was this huge campaign in the US to fight and the theater rose up and the president took it in hand so it ordered the military to stop the military so that's when they started to establish the rest of the reparations and he ghettoized sex work during the checks by army medical physicians although the men were exempted for US structures residences in all the other US bases so the Philippines was hiding there in US military history in rejoining what Kramer calls the military prostitution complex so there's a military industrial complex and there's a military prostitution complex I think CPS references this a bit in banana but I don't have this specific yeah I will this is very helpful because a lot of the opposition to any spectrum legalization of prostitution the Philippines from the feminist movement derives heavily from the military connection there's a lot of work so so based on my interview so a lot of the there is a legal tension in Philippine law right now because officially under the penal code sex is criminalized under the anti-trafficking law it can be interpreted as a strong suggestion that most women in prostitution are victims and the feminist movement in general is advocating for an anti-prostitution law that follows the Nordic model that decriminalizes the sale because the assumption is the woman is a victim sex worker is a victim and has no control over what's happening and what's happening to the clients and the managers and the pimps so the anti-trafficking movement has gotten behind this formulation of prostitution I get why that's happening I think it is a reaction and they explicitly say that this is a way to correct for the perception that you know the prostitute is like an evil home wrecker person with an out of control sexuality stigmatizes this is an attempt to reduce the stigma plus it stems from a genuine belief that it's really an unequal power relationship and it's rooted in the patriarchy and it can't ever be a situation where the actor involved exercises agency when I speak to the women based on the interview data I have this is not quantitative this is like 50 women a lot so they do not conceive of what we would call pimps so they call them bugaus as people who exploit them a lot of times these are distant relatives or friends that they view as sources of income or people who provided them economic opportunities or who protect them from abusive clients or who negotiate with the police on their behalf who give them low interest loans who pay for their abortions when they need them there are obviously there are abusive pimps but in the predominant like in terms of most of the answers they conceive of their pimps as friends or as people who help them so that's one in terms of clients so the anti-trafficking movement has a tendency to portray clients as abusive, violent the brave men who have no respect for them whatsoever this seems to be the minority of cases that women describe a lot of times they're just like regular people or their regular clients with fondness they're like they're just like our friends 10% of the time goes to sex 90% goes to chats so that's what they say in 9 out of 10 cases the abuser is a cop not a client which is why they're very opposed to any policy that increases their exposure to cops or increases the police's power of them they share that an inch I don't want to call it interesting because it's appalling thing that happened that I did not anticipate when I started this research was the drug war that Professor Afanas talked about extensively and it has affected sex workers in two ways that I've identified in my interviews one, because of this link between sex work and drugs and sometimes feminists without realizing the implications of what they're doing keep pointing to this link to demonstrate but it is not safe to keep making that link in this regime of a violent drug war because many sex workers that I've spoken to have disappeared, gone into hiding or by many like 7 have been conferred to have been shot because they show up in this random drug list it is entirely possible that some of them have been using drugs by them because a reason to kill people so that's one next, a lot of them are now less willing to like go to the street because they're afraid that they'll get shot, they'll get exposed they'll be seen with a client who's known to be using drugs which means a lot of them their income has decreased many of them are less willing to speak to people so in the past they were very candid with me now they're just like are you working with a police are you sure you're not working with a police so there's a lot of that finally I've spoken to two of them whose husbands were killed under Tokang and they weren't doing sex work before that so they're now going into sex work so these were things I did not expect when they started the project but it might actually be a part of it now it is sad I was wondering whether some part of it was like exploded in this weather what sort of agency strategy that's an excellent question so this is a very heated debate and feminist it's never going to get resolved on one hand you have one side that's just like it's impossible to exercise agency in this kind of relationship on the other hand there's like oh it's fully empowered neither of those frameworks really useful especially a lot of this literature is written in the west there's a bit more now about South Asia, Latin America, some about the Philippines so the argument that I'm getting at right now is there is some agency involved here so the framework I'm using is adaptive preferences in that their choices are extremely circumscribed and they are aware of this so they are aware of the limited control that they have but they seek to direct whatever benefit they can to themselves given that limited control so they are aware that the alternatives they have are factory work, domestic work or just complete dependence on a partner who might be abusive or have no job in terms of transacting with customers there is a demonstration of agency as well obviously quite limited when they will say things like we obviously manipulate their emotions like at first we're very nice and very sweet and you have to be firm with them when you enter the room so they don't abuse you, you have to like speak in a really like firm tone of voice and go you must with all the condo and like you have to have ties with the hotel staff so that your customer doesn't run away without paying or if he abuses you you know the staff, you know the front desk they're going to call the police for you or they'll just beat him up for you or sometimes if they work in bars to circumvent the because you have to split the profit with the bar owners of the bar fine, right? Circumvent this they just negotiate with the customers on a one on one especially if it's a regular and trust has been established so these are obviously like very circumscribed situations but they have shown like cognizance of the limited control they have, there's awareness of like decision making that's happening we're still like developing this idea to demonstrate that there is some agency enough that we need to listen to them and their voices when making policy about them because they are not officially consulted the people who are consulted in the anti-trafficking sector are sex workers who have been rescued or who sought help who then turn into survivors and spokesperson for the anti-trafficking movement and who predominantly are against the legalization of sex work and say that it's inherently exploited which is like a view I completely respect although I'm also a bit critical of this because obviously these women are dependent on the anti-trafficking organizations that rescue them for economic survival and given the stigma of sex work it's very hard to come forward and say no actually it chose to get into that like there's a lot of emphasis on which women deserve our help and which women don't, right? That's also a theme that I'm exploring. It's a mixture so a lot of them complain about the stigma they get even from their own families but there's also some degree of defiance so I'm going to say it in Filipino then I'll translate it so they'll say things like we feed you family so why are you condemning us or some of it is a bit more seen but I really like it so they're just like to the manager you think you're just sitting there and wait for me to give you money but I'm the one who spreads my legs every night so there are some of these fighting words as well and they're like why would I be ashamed I'm doing an honest job I'm not a corrupt politician I'm not stealing money from anyone I'm not raping anyone and a lot of times they contrast themselves to policemen because these are the people they interact with a lot and they're like I haven't stolen anything but they steal our money so things like that I just got reminded the other interesting thing is this weird microeconomy of bribery so the cops expect them to preemptively pay bribes so that they don't get arrested or even just chewed away because they're prime areas where you have maximum exposure to customers and if you don't pray bribes and it's hard for you to like stand there you have to move to a corner where you're less visible and even among the women there's some infighting so the ones who pay bribes get mad at those who don't because then they all get raided so yes it's exactly what you were saying earlier but except they're really vulnerable and can't fight it and so like one anecdote was this woman who said for one week she didn't pay the 800 bribe she said translating is about 10 pounds and 12 pounds she didn't pay it and then when a customer was about to approach her another woman who pays the bribe says don't go to that woman she's infected like I see so these things because cops have a lot of power in either even in an anti-trafficking even if the anti-trafficking establishment works as well as they want it to work both cops exerting a lot of power with these women My name's Seb I'm at Warwick University in the Department of Politics and International Studies I'm in the third year of my PhD and I am not a Philippines expert so it's just me and you Chase we got somewhere shared a common ground but I would love your opinions, feedback and I just want you to know how interesting my PhD is so I'm looking at the political economy of Christian conversion among a marginalised ethnic minority group in Vietnam so the group that I research called Dachmong they're a transnational group spread across the borderlands of Vietnam China, Laos, Thailand and some US and Australian diasporas they have a history of marginalisation impoverishment but also they're seen by state authorities as quite independent and difficult to govern in the kind of James Scott's art of not being governed framework if you're familiar with that they also have a history of religion as a source of political mobilisation there's a history of messianic or millenarian movements in which religion can be a great mobilising factor but also cause a lot of inter-ethnic disunity and conflict at the same time and in Vietnam they're the bottom of the list of ethnic minorities in terms of highest poverty rates lowest education rates and they're kind of stigmatised as non-language which no one bothers learning and in the last 40 years they've all been converting to Christianity Protestant Christianity out of nowhere which no one was expecting well, they might have expected it if they'd looked at the history but it came as a big shock to the Vietnamese government because there wasn't any missionaries there it came through these radio broadcasts from some American evangelical radio station but based in Manila actually so there's my link to the Philippines so for whatever reason which I don't have time to go into the message really resonated with a lot of people and now there's about 300 to 400,000 among Christians out of a population of 1 million in Vietnam and rising so I look at the effects of the political and economic effects primarily in a context of at the same time an expansion of the market economy into the highlands in Vietnam where the government are trying to get people into the market economy and stop them from becoming from being self-sufficient and trying to get them into the cash economy so some of the effects is a huge range of effects of Christian conversion there's rise of new elites within communities, these pastors who are younger than the normal elites and challenged local authorities and have a lot of power because everyone listens to them the Hmong don't always listen to the government and there's new attitudes towards money and productivity and this changing lifestyle there's evidence of kind of neo-vibrarian kind of discipline, ethic and pastors seen as kind of encouraging their congregation to move away from like wasteful practices of traditional rituals and become more entrepreneurial and try and help them get out of their poverty situation but I guess the thing I want to very briefly talk about and ask in relation to, especially what you were talking about from a food podium point of view is and link to your work about conversion and translation as well often times, especially in the historical colonial context conversion is seen as a kind of hand in hand with colonialism and it's a kind of seen as conversion as submission so conversion to this western imperial force that's the natives having to submit and be dominated whereas in this context it's quite interesting and arguably conversion can be seen as resistance because even Christian conversion is a conversion away from what is the kind of dominant Buddhist religious framework of the rest of the country and so they are kind of embracing an alternative modernity which may well end up bringing them into the capitalist fold eventually but for the time being it's also quite confrontational with Vietnamese state agendas and has caused a lot of conflict there's been a lot of persecution among Christians and so to what degree is and Vietnamese government actors have seen Christianity among them as a threat they've seen it as something that hostile forces might be using to try and undermine social order in their socialist utopia but then at the same time Christianity shares some common goals with the Vietnamese state led development agenda they both want to make people more productive they both want people to embrace the market economy and so there's some things where these two forces are working together and sometimes they seem to come up against each other but through all of this I kind of stick to a strong view of among agency in that they're not just being affected by these external forces but they're actively choosing which forces to align to and in a position of marginalization they should still show agency in selecting their tactics to engage with these external powers and so I use kind of everyday politics concepts from the cochlear and James Scott as well so yeah that's about all I've got to say so we'd like to hear what your thoughts are really so the there's about just over a million Hmong in Vietnam so about 300 to 400,000 so it's quite big and it's growing it could be 50% in 10, 20 years time so initially the input was from this Christian radio station so there weren't any missionaries on the ground which is another reason which I could would argue for is like Hmong showing agency within themselves or certain groups of Hmong actively converting and then going on to convert others now there is more input from international Christian networks but for a long time it's quite an isolated thing like no one even knew that these people would become Christians for like 10 years and then word got out that there was 100,000 Christians up in the hills and the government didn't like it kind of thing yeah I suppose so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah this is why I think it's a really interesting case study because even in protestant so what differences do you think that you have earlier generation converted to both Vietnam and New Generation that are now being sent by all these missionaries coming in and sort of wrapping up and developing the Vietnam itself rather than the different conditions so there are differences within like the first generation of kind of church leaders who converted from listening to the radio station to the newer generation of people who grew up in Christian families and more likely to become students and go study in Hanoi and go to like a Bible school there which like when they first converted it took them years to even find the Christian church in Hanoi they the radio station told them to go down to Hanoi and find the Christians and then they got to the Catholic church and all became Catholics and then after a while they were like wait this isn't quite right and then they found the protestant church and they were like oh yeah this sounds right but yeah the new generation are more likely to be also in connection with like a wider transnational Hmong population which spreads as far as America in London no I can't find any it's a nightmare there's some in France though because they were all in the Indochina war so some of them became refugees at that time yes yes over in the west I'm just curious because you said you've offered the lack of missionaries so to what extent is this a conversion to a religion rather than an ideology that they see as a political use of them I was quite curious because you talked about how they went to the Catholic church and the protestant church was this a kind of theologically appealing doctrine to them or was it I was quite curious to what extent can we say are they converted to Christianity sure so not that Christianity is one thing you know yeah so I would have to say that that question depends on your own conceptual framework I'm coming from a kind of cultural political economy framework where I often fall into the trap of seeing religion in quite instrumental terms and looking at its effects on political relations and in fact again quite unusually I argue that in several aspects Christian conversion can be seen as quite an empowering thing but that's not necessarily how they would see it certainly the time of mass change, call it conversion or call it something else, was in a time of economic crisis the economic reforms had just started but all the subsidies to these collectivised plantations which they'd tried getting all the Hmong to work on and then it didn't work out so there was a kind of economic crisis and there's this message coming from abroad of this hope of salvation and it's in the Hmong language there's nothing else in the radio station in the Hmong language so that's a very appealing there's definitely a lot of different elements to this new input religious ethnic arguably political and economic and but then when you interview them the older generation the most common reason they say is our old customs were really getting quite expensive and we had to sacrifice this buffalo when someone died and we were all really poor and we couldn't afford it anymore but this new religion says you don't have to sacrifice anything anymore because the sacrifice has already been paid by Jesus etc and so that was great and this new god will protect us from all the bad things that will happen when we stop doing the sacrifices so in that sense that sounds like a very religious cultural explanation to conversion so I guess there's a really good book by Tom Ngho called The New Way which is how they define Protestantism that's what they call it in their language and this is more anthropological I'm more on the political economy side the impact since conversion so there was a a group of mong who fought in the Cold War for America in Laos a lot of them managed to become refugees in America and so they got one of these people the mong people to do the broadcasting in their mong language so it was targeted but they still didn't know that they'd hit anything for 10 years or something messages finally got out from the highlands back to the radio yeah and then so the whole Foucaultian concepts of governmentality and biopolitics I sometimes think is quite is very much emphasizing the power of strong actors, either government actors or market forces in fashioning and disciplining local people and I think there's a lot of that going on but at the same time I kind of want to emphasize the agency of people making their decisions as well which in some ways comes out of the history of conversion and then becomes appropriated by states as they move into the post-abundance and it would be interesting to see there's plenty of that going on in the world because then that requires a part of the relationship authority where the assumption is that there's always somebody there who's monitoring and supervising the same thing you have to be the way for example in a monastery you have the masters supervising the monks which is not entirely foreign or in a kind of Vietnamese communist surveillance regime but then in a sense the step on from that is self-governance self-governmentality where you can internalize it and get people to look after themselves and maybe that's something is like more about what's happening among this exactly that's where you go to graduate school so you learn how to conduct yourself that's why you can get a supervisor so you have a master it's a master of disciples it's a very nice book I can kind of see that going on but well maybe the structures are they're not that well established in mon christian networks they're quite loose but I would say there's this yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah Yeah, it absolutely is. So you were speaking of the first generation of novels, or the first generation? The first generation did not. So the radio session was their only source, and oftentimes they were taking this and then merging it with their own concepts of spirituality and the spiritual realm, and you got some interesting sects and stuff happening, but more recently now the Hmong language Bibles are being smuggled in because they're banned in Vietnam, but these days it's very easy to get past the order. And then my follow-up questions was to gather... Yeah, oftentimes the church leader was just the first person in the village who heard about it and became the de facto church leader. And a lot of some of these church leaders have risen to become kind of like big men in their community and they held immense authority due to their combination of like spiritual authority, but also they become these like political brokers where they speak on behalf of the people and sometimes stand up to the authorities, sometimes do deals with the authorities and end up becoming quite rich, but they're very well connected and they become players in the local political economies. And headed because the new community leader was very, very like api-drinking and you know it's straight to one sort of thing that's not an increase in it, so I was like, oh let's all have trance after that. A lot of people weren't turned off by the way it was used. I wonder how much of that happened to me, the personality of the church leader that I've heard about. Yeah, I think it does in certain situations. Thanks so much. Hi, I'm Michael Nagak. I'm graduating for my BA psychosocial studies here at Birkbeck and before I start or give you what I'm working on, my tutor actually gave me instructions to tell you what a psychosocial studies is because most people do not know a psychosocial studies. It is actually an interdisciplinary which primarily focuses on post-colonial gender and social theories and then intersecting it with psychoanalysis. So to quote Birkbeck's psychosocial department, psychosocial studies enables us to unravel the interconnected psychic and social forces that produce us as people and to determine our complex relations to one another while sociology students study the social world and psychology students study the brain and behavior. Psychosocial studies students investigate the relation between individuals and the social sphere, how people are made up of the relationships they have with one another and with the world around them. This means deepening our understanding of the emotional, imaginary and symbolic aspects of living together. So for my BA dissertation, I am working on the Oversys Filipino Woman Domestic Worker which is one identity which is currently brought into the global spotlight in recent years. So concerning discourse which are circulating within the Philippines and globally with regards to different forms of oppressions, some say it is a modern form of slavery that are experienced by OFWs are ubiquitous. One current incident which spiked more debate regarding the welfare and protection of OFWs was the brutal death of Joana Dimafiles in Kuwait. Her body was found inside a freezer of February this year. So this violence inflicted towards OFW is not new. One of the most publicized and debated incident concerning oppression resulting to a death of an OFW was the hanging of floor contemplation in Singapore in 1995. So with this reason my dissertation wants to revisit to emphasize as well, reanalyze published works particularly of Rachel Parenias regarding the identity of the Oversys Filipino Woman Domestic Worker but particularly using a psychosocial approach. Coting Stephen Frosch by using a psychosocial perspective the research aims to present a humanistic therapeutic one a mode of personalizing or humanizing form of research or reanalysis. Also psychosocial work rescues agency and emotion to reconstitute a holistic individual who still has to be theorized in relation to an often persecutory outside. So with this in mind through using psychosocial theories in the reanalysis we might be able to find gaps to further understand and illuminate the subjectivity subject position and agency of the OFW particularly as Filipino mother within contemporary Filipino society. So I'm concentrating on these temporalities because the dissertation aims to get into the origin. My origin here is non-modelific as well of how an OFW identity is partially constructed and represented by being mothers in the Philippines in modern globalized time. I'm also thinking on how an identity like an OFW is also a product of history where it is highly interlinked with colonialism which then implicates our Filipino society constructs identities, subjectivity and subject position. Also to note that within psychoanalysis the mother is theorized as the repository of different forms of anxieties of the infant which can also be interpreted in social context as women or mothers as repository of social anxieties. So the research intends to present the intersection between the psychic and the social space focusing on contemporary Filipino identity. Furthermore, it wants to find answers on how a subject can find a form of agency even from within structures of power which is very Foucaultian as well and to be a platform to Filipino feminism and subaltern studies. Since the focus of the dissertation is on overseas Filipino woman domestic worker the research will evaluate on how Filipino woman identity is socially constructed and represented and how it affects their subjectivity. And to quote Pareñas as well she said Filipino feminists have argued that Filipino women have long been constructed in Filipino society as nothing more than dutiful daughters and suffering mothers which is an ideology which is written within the Catholic faith. So I really want to take the suffering mothers concept and connect it into more in a psychoanalysis deconstruction as well on how she is represented as both suffering mother in the Philippines at the same time how she internalized or does she internalize the whole concept as her own subject and is she encapsulated only as suffering mothers or a suffering mother. Yeah, so that's that. I know sometimes it gets a bit, for me it's quite difficult to explain psychosocial as well because sometimes psychoanalysis could be a bit daunting to some people I mean for me as a Filipino who's read psychoanalysis Freud, Lacan and Dion and Vinnikot as well it is a very Eurocentric point of view there is no doubting on that and so you have to deconstruct a European conception and try to relate it into my own sense of culture and it's quite difficult to navigate within those lines but I'll get there somehow. Yes, exactly same questions that my supervisor has already asked me so I told her that I think it would be very realistic if I focus on Rachel Prenni's work so she has transcripts already and the transcripts that she has provided are quite varied so there's a children's point of view on how they see their mothers which is you could really get into the detail of abandonment and jealousy and envy again going back to psychoanalysis but at the same time I was told that do not take it from sorry, digressing so Rachel Prenni's work focusing on the transcripts coming from the mother not from the children to give voices to mothers to see how their stories are told so yes yes it's actually varied so when I say so that's the reason why I really just want to focus on mothers and these mothers also have descriptions of their lives in the Philippines before moving out of the Philippines as well to be OFWs yes because what I mentioned in the household domestic work and they seem extra proud of the income that they brought back to their family so this example of a mother is someone who is able to bring full money and like spend for your family as well and obviously how that is informed by the political ideology so do you engage with this okay so thank you that's a very interesting question the one thing that Prennias also talks about is I don't know if I'm going to answer your question but one way I could see it is in a Filipino social construct there's within the family the father is known to live in the house the mother is known which is the light of the home so what happens according to Prennias is if the father could not provide or provide enough for the family then this globalized new liberal issue of who does provide enough and then the mothers then become default breadwinners or they both care and provide for the family that's the reason why where we say in psychoanalysis the mothers then become a repository of social anxiety or family anxiety it's always sorry not to generalize sometimes it's the mothers who get anxieties of the family or the society SPJ yeah yes I think would be part of my literature but coming from a subaltern study point of view because she does you know could always have she's you know very much Marxist but I do not want to go deeper into that because that is not my I do not I could not expand further except for the whole concept that if I see a woman a Filipino woman is a subaltern because she does not have a voice within the norm or is still trying to find a voice within the norm going into labor on Marxist it's not my specialty so I it would still be part of the literature review but going deeper into it would not be something I would indulge in because to be honest with you we have this discussion as well I'm doing a BA dissertation so and I'm only given 8,000 8,000 words and so at the end of the day I've already almost covered my literature review and then my supervisor I said explain further so I'm like how could I explain further you're only giving me 8,000 words and I have to have more analysis word count in my analysis I have to that's where I'm heading towards as well never thought of it that way yes right right yes I get your point but at the same time it's quite difficult I will go deeper into this discussion the issue that I always have with regards to labor as no doubting that mothers are the women for my study mothers it's always been constructed as objects already at the end of the day othering equals objects and the same thing in psychoanalysis you always other the mother there's no doubting on that it's very explicit in psychoanalysis what we are always encouraged as well is can you see a mother who is not an object so if I bring labor into the picture or into the dissertation then I am already objectifying the mother okay right yes okay right yes it's the question but thank you but can I ask though with regards to agency there are different definitions of agency as well right so as long as I pin down my own definition of agency then I can work with that own definition and then expand it further perhaps from their discourse then you begin to make sense of how they make sense of their work so it's not about you making sense of their work it's about you making sense of how they make sense of their work so that's as you don't begin to say oh okay this is my definition of agency you begin by saying what is their definition of agency does that make sense yes it does thank you hopefully it will get better but thank you okay hi everybody so I'm Caroline I'm going to present something on my PhD research and this is basically a working paper I've published with the economics department yet so I'm just going to give you a quick overview of sort of what I've done and the conclusions that I've drawn from this so I'm looking at the palm oil industry in the Philippines and I'm engaging with commodity chains literatures and trying to combine it with land literatures so in particular with respect to the Philippines I'm looking at land reform literatures so just to give you a quick overview not to go too much into detail so what is land redistribution so it's basically as Boros defines it the net transfer of wealth and power from the land to the landless and to land poor classes so as a result of that picture you would assume theoretically speaking that redistributive land reform would imply sort of social and economic upgrading opportunities so if you would give people land that they would have the opportunity to make this land productive and then get income from that and so on so basically it would imply increase in productivity growth and output and at the same time also reduce poverty so theoretically speaking surprisingly land has not gotten recently any prominent position within the chain literature and has been mostly fixated on capital and to a lesser extent more recently on labor so what I'm trying to do in this paper is I'm trying to integrate land and its relationship to capital and labor into this understanding of commodity chains with especially looking at the Philippines and the Palma Valley chain and what are sort of the consequences to economic and social up and down grid trajectories so I used a case study of the CARB the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program in the oil prime industry in Agus and Esor so in Mindanao so what is the CARB I'm not sure if you are familiar with it but this is just a quick overview so it was basically instigated under Aquino in 1988 and it follows the land to the tiller logic so you give land from the lander to the landless basically and it was distinct from previous attempts of land reform in the Philippines and that it was mainly driven by a revolutionary and social movements which were promoted by the peasantry and this was mostly in protest against the corrupt and very high unequal land distribution in the Philippines so really Anderson pointed out that basically the monopolization of land ownership and the control of that land by the lander class was the result of the increasing concentration of land ownership during Spanish and US colonial times so the CARB initially was distributed 10 years so until 1998 and it was supposed to redistribute 10.3 million hectares but it has fell short of its targets it was concluded in 2014 but it has been again extended and is still not sure where the CARB is going from here on and at the moment around 8 million hectares have been distributed so the maximum you can get is 3 hectares so usually you would get something from like sometimes 0.5 hectares or some of 3 hectares just shortly about my method so this is part of my PhD fieldwork and this is basically reliant on qualitative methods so I did participant observations semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions and I matched it with some of the data that I collected during my fieldwork there's not much secondary literature on the oil palm industry in the Philippines in general and then with particular focus on Agus Anderson so also so my PhD itself focuses on the whole industry in the Philippines but in this paper I just focus on Agus Anderson because there you can see the dynamics of the agrarian reform on dynamics on the ground and yeah I basically try to interview everybody that's sort of involved in production and in the milling operations yeah and I used and Vivo for my qualitative data analysis so just a quick overview on the Filipino oil palm chain so it's a rather recent development in the Philippines so it was mainly pushed by development agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank and it was in support of export-oriented industrialization so Marcos heavily supported the development of the oil palm industry in that it would earn him foreign currency for exports so to give you some numbers between 2000 and 2014 oil palm production increased by 79% and the area itself increased by 244% so that already gives you a hint in terms of productivity that area total area increased but oil palm production didn't increase proportionately and some of these issues are related to land issues at the moment there's around 19,000 hectares that are producing oil palm which is relatively small compared to other Southeast Asian producers and it's mostly in Mindanao and recently there has been since the mid-2000s there has been expansions Palawan around 10,000 hectares and Bohol which has around 6,000 hectares so if you're around the tourist areas you might be able to go a bit off the track and visit some of your plantations the way in which I look at the chain is that it's mainly bio-driven which means basically that so oil palm is a fruit crop so it's sort of a cousin of the coconut it's a palm tree which grows fruits and from these fruit lids you can extract oil and you need to mill the fruits for 48 hours so that basically means that you need to be relatively close to the mill otherwise your fruits will be pointless and in the case of the Philippines the fruits are usually not used for local consumption whereas if you look at West Africa for instance it's used in their local cuisine this is where the plant actually originates from so that basically means if you're oil palm producer you need to have a mill around you to which you can sell your oil palm but because the grower is dependent on that mill it can basically exert disproportionate power over these production units so as a result these producers are basically price takers and they have to take whatever the mill is suggesting also because it's a big capital investment you don't have many mills next to each other so usually if you're within a certain area maximum there will be two mills you can actually sell to usually there's only one mill in your area so you have to sell to this particular mill so in Agus and Esur what was implemented is that you had large scale plantation companies that were from Malaysia that were previously invited by the Marcus government and because the Philippine land reform was implemented these plantation companies were basically accommodated with a so-called Lisbeck arrangement to keep these transnational companies within the country because you didn't want to lose them and that they would go elsewhere so basically how that worked is that the land was redistributed as a collective title to the plantation laborers so you had a plantation company that got the land previously assigned by Marcus as so-called alienable and disposable land which basically means it wasn't used which obviously also wasn't true because you had a lot of indigenous people living on this land and living from the land but this is how Marcus declared the land as sort of public lands and when the land reform was implemented this land was then it had to undergo land reform and it was basically given to the workers of these plantation companies and then there was a condition attached to this that this land also had to be Lisbeck at the same time back to the plantation company so it effectively meant that the control over the land and the power over the land was not redistributed to the beneficiaries but actually was maintained by these milling companies these Lisbeck arrangements were usually entered for 25 years and it implied a fixed rent over 635 pesos per hectare per year so if you would sort of look at it from an average perspective if you would have 3 hectares per person you would get around $78 per year or per day something like 20 cents so the aim of the land reform was to create livelihoods for people and to sort of make them independent of other sources of income so sort of develop agriculture development in the Philippines but obviously if you look at how much these people would earn per day they would necessarily lead up to that so what instead was happening in these oil plantations with respect to land reform is that the interests of these big multinational corporations were protected so therefore no actual transfer of power and wealth was gained so the carb essentially thereby restricts the expansion of plantation because that means if you have a plantation company now that wants to expand its operation it means you have to negotiate with all these people that only have 3 hectares so if you want to extend by 10,000 hectares that means you have to talk to a lot of people just to be able to get some sort of more production so with oil pump something would only become profitable 4,000 hectares and up so it means you need to have large scale plantations carb at the same time also didn't lead to the promised increase of productivity as I hinted on before actually what it led to is decreasing yields and no replanting so basically these plantation companies push back the responsibility of investing into land back to the land owners and back to the cooperatives that were managing these collective titles so say you have a collective title one company gets two collective titles so 8,000 hectares might be split up into 4,000 hectares those 4,000 hectares are split up into 3 hectares each so you have a cooperative who takes care of each title so 4,000 people so the plantation company when it comes to investments into the land would push back that responsibility back to the cooperatives at the same time these plantation companies also this is not unique obviously to the oil pump sector this is happening in all sorts of agricultural sectors in the Philippines and beyond that also is union busting so the retrenchment of workers and thereby the contractualization as a result actually land reform beneficiaries they become workers themselves on their own land and are employed in precarious work so as a conclusion as I said before the land reform program has not led to an actual chance of power and wealth from the land to landless wherein the milling companies were able to retain the control over the land and over the profits thereby the carp has actually led to exacerbating social inequalities between workers and cooperatives and has led to the change in the land and there are similar findings in other sectors like the other plantation sectors like banana and pineapple so theoretically speaking what I'm arguing is that you need to bring back the question of land into commodity studies to understand the underlying power distributions and the changing distributions if changes happen to land and the way in which then power structures along the chain along the commodity chain actually change the development of a grand reform continues belief in these collective clover so it continues these things that giving land to a group of people and not giving them the decision power over their own plot of land is the way to go forward thereby not only but obviously also ignoring all the overlapping land claims that have been made especially in the now known context so as I stated before the land was stated to be disposable markers but previously obviously had also been other people living on the land which until today are making claims to the land and detector specifically uses the oil palm industry as a vehicle of peace so if you've recently maybe read the news so he's basically suggesting the mountain members should go to Malaysia to learn about rubber and oil palm so that they when they come back they have a new means of livelihood and this has been actually already been done in Maginda now in Zamboanga so what I've been I didn't go to into Sultan Kudarat and the people I interviewed there were telling me that it had been successful in transforming terrorists into peaceful oil palm growers in the area so this is something if somebody's interested and wants to do some research I think that's a very interesting piece of research okay thank you that's it so if you have any questions I know this is not necessarily related to your guys' work but just if you have questions about the details of the study or anything yes yes yeah yeah yeah yeah it's very difficult to say I mean it depends on sort of which sectors you look at which agricultural crop but I mean from what I see from the oil palm it's difficult to see positive sides because these people are also not a lot of times these people are not just dependent on the land right they have other sorts of income so they just use it as an additional source of income so the aim of the land reform was actually to develop agriculture and to get this peasantry growing and to strengthen this peasantry but I'm not sure whether this is happening with the oil palm industry because these people are some of these people live in urban areas and then just have another plot of land so it's also restricted in terms of how much land you can own and the legal trade going on illegal trade going on where people accumulate more because others maybe don't use it so some people have actually 100 hectares instead of just 3 how much? I mean so I think there is an issue with the oil palm generally so this is industrial agriculture so that in itself I think limits the development potential of an agriculture backbone of the country because it's not the industry it's not agriculture per se so I would start actually from there saying that maybe plantation agriculture is not the way to go so you can see in pineapple and banana that's not developing a peasantry what you're actually creating is farm workers that have precarious jobs and maybe have some land somehow with the plantation that's leased to the plantation but then actually land owners working on their own plot of land I mean these people they don't know where their land is so they get a collective title of 4,000 hectares but they don't know where their land is it has never been designated to them it's just collectively you own this now and then they're stuck also right so you cannot just get out of it and no you cannot I mean you can inherit it or anything but you cannot you cannot say I want to take now my 3 hectares out and I want to do something more productive you cannot you're stuck with that cooperative who is managing everything and it's the issue with the DAR because the DAR still insists that this is the way to go because it's accommodating for these plantation companies interests but it's not acknowledging that even though it's been going on for so long that actually nothing has changed in terms of agriculture I think that the problem also is that because there are other sources of income and I mean we've talked about OFWs and everything I mean the areas that I've went to obviously a lot of people have families abroad whether it's urban or whether it's abroad so the there seems to be some developmental impact in terms of changes of what you see outside from in the villages and it's actually developing but in terms of working conditions or conditions in the plantation yeah that's nothing has actually changed it's gotten worse I mean there's has been a lot of union busting so there's barely any unions left so the voices of the plantation laborers are basically silenced and they become contractualized so you have this law in the Philippines that you cannot be employed more than six months if you're contractual labor so you're the five and a half months they're employed by some contractual labor agency and then after that they go to another agency and then the five and a half months employed there so then they just start switching around but yeah effectively they are long-term employees on a contractual basis and this is again not unique just to oil palm this is in all plantation industries in the Philippines and obviously there's a general issue towards the neglect of agriculture within policymaking within policymaking discourse because it seems something remote something of we have overcome sort of thing we should focus on the service industry the manufacturing these sort of more yeah sexy topics so I think I mean especially if you look at people who do not have the means to go to the urban centers or who do but don't have the education bringing people back into rural areas I think is something very important could be yeah could imply some meaningful development but yeah I mean if I look at my mom who's from the rural area none of the children actually continue to like run some of the coconut plantations obviously so yeah so the land issue in the Philippines is quite particular I would say because you also have the issue of so there's this indigenous law of 1998 I think on the April law so what they have been because of the carp and expansion of plantation has become difficult what now these plantation companies are doing is actually those native lands that have been formalized into titles for their native communities so you have areas that might be 2,000 to 3,000 hectares large that are they have a title for that specific indigenous community and now these companies go in and try to obviously convince certain people within those community to lease their land to these companies and that obviously introduces all sorts of issues within these communities and power structures within those communities yeah yeah so it's the land to the tiller logic which happened in a lot of different places the way though in the Philippines it happened was very slow and very much like I mean if you look at Akinu for instance they have their famous Acian de Lucita so that never underwent land reform so you had an attempt but it was never a serious attempt so this is very much different from places like Vietnam or other Southeast Asian countries where the land reform was pushed through within like a certain amount of time and that just never until now never happened in the Philippines so Acian de Lucita is still up in the air it's still under the Akinos so you still have like big families like the Florianos in Mindanao who are still have yeah interested in the so they also had to undergo land reform and gave it back to the plantation labor similar story to this one but obviously they still held the the power over the profits and power over the land yeah yeah right yeah it is a bit like it's like some sort of illusion of having land but you don't even know where your land is thanks so my name is Tanika and I'm a historical lexicographer so I'm world English editor for the Oxford English Dictionary so I'm here to talk about Leicester Leiter which is words so I thought it would be interesting to start first with some background on the history of lexicography in the Philippines so lexicography the creation of dictionaries and actually as I mentioned before in one of the previous talks if there is something that we owe to the Spanish friars is that they actually contributed a lot in many of our languages because in the 16th and 17th centuries they started to write dictionaries of several Philippine languages so that includes Tagalog Pampangan and discontinued on even until the 19th century and for some of these languages these dictionaries written in the Spanish period are still perhaps the best existing documentation for these languages now as far as the Americans, their contribution to Philippine lexicography has been a bit more limited so there have been some studies by anthropological linguists during the American period but still very limited compared to what the Spanish friars did because they did this as part of their Christianizing mission you know but what did happen in the American period was very important for lexicography in the Philippines is that was when Tagalog was officially adopted as the basis of the national language and and the need to standardize this newly created lingua franca provided renewed stimulus for more lexicographical activity in the islands so the national language movement in the 1920s and 30s and there were also after the Second World War some efforts to promote this new national language because as you all know the fact that Tagalog became the basis of Filipino was not exactly an idea that everybody in the Philippines embraced especially those people who didn't exactly speak Tagalog as a native language and and so this is the time when in the so talking about dictionaries of the national language some of the most important ones that have been published is the one that was published by the Commission on Filipino Language in 1989 the Dixionario on the weekend Filipino and this was later followed by the UP Dixionario on Filipino edited by Virgilio Almario which first came out in 2001 and then there was a second edition that came out in 2010 but the thing with these dictionaries is that as I mentioned before they are they're not still what we would call evidence based dictionaries so you just have editors basically telling you what they think these words mean but they've just started a new research project in in UP now to create a new dictionary of Filipino that will be based on actual language corpora and actual evidence of language use but it's still in very early stages but there's a lot of hope for so I'm very excited about how that project is going to turn out and then as far as the Philippine variety of English there have also been some attempts to codify them so most notably there is the Anvil Macquarie Dixionario of Philippine English for high school but although there are these sort of attempts to document Philippine English if you ask any Filipino who wants to buy a dictionary of English they wouldn't go and ask for maybe an American would naturally buy a Webster dictionary but a Filipino would also buy a Webster dictionary and not a Philippine English dictionary and as far as lexicography is concerned American English still reigns supreme in the Philippines and Websters is still the dictionary of choice since American English is the basis of English in the Philippines now but then you wonder how is the Philippines represented in this dictionary so as early as 1970 there's been a study by Yap where she looked at Webster's new international dictionary of the English language of 1961 and also Webster's third which came out in 1968 and she looked for so we're talking about paper dictionary here so should she read it and she found that there are these types of words so as you can see that these words are words of mostly botanical, zoological and anthropological interest that date back to the American colonial period but obviously these are not the type of words that a speaker of Philippine English would be using in their everyday life but it's not only in English dictionaries that the Philippines has made a mark so recently I've just been looking at Nina Custubres-Filipinas which is a novel that was written by Pedro Paterno that was published in 1885 and it's a really horrible book as a novel it's just it's like worse than any tellisserie currently on air I mean it's just really horrible as a novel I mean it's no limit on heredas for sure but it's interesting about this this book is that there are so many it's written in Spanish but there are so many Filipino words in it so words from Tagalog and other Philippine languages and some of them are actually recorded in the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy and perhaps my most favorite of all these words is tabo which until now if you can read Spanish the dictionary of the Royal Academy is available online so you can search for it and tabo is there and it's it's defined as so when I was adding the same word to the OED a couple of years ago I updated the Spanish definition a bit by recognizing the tabo's modern form so I defined it as a dipper used to scoop up water from a pail or bucket while washing traditionally made of coconut shell or bamboo but now more commonly made of plastic so the Spanish only recognized the coconut one but who uses coconut tabo anymore so we mostly use plastic so I thought it was interesting to look at Nina because most research now on Phil Hispanic literature is done from a literary perspective but as a lexicographer I find it interesting that literature can also be used for lexical investigations it makes me wonder what can result about the evolution of our vocabulary and how about the other propagandists and how about the writers of the golden age of Phil Hispanic literature people like Clara M. Recto, Jesus Balmory Cecilia Postol, Evangina Guerrero so if you look at these books like what borrowings and other types of lexical innovation can be found in these examples of Phil Hispanic literature so when I first arrived at OUP six years ago I was very interested to find out how the Philippines is represented in the OED and what makes the OED particularly special is that it's a historical dictionary so apart from the definitions pronunciations and the typical information that you can find in any dictionary the other thing that you can find in the OED is actual historical evidence of the word being used so for every entry you will find the earliest citations starting from the first pause the earliest use of the word in written English so as an OED editor my task apart from defining a word is finding the earliest as far as we are able to find the earliest usage of a word in English so this makes the OED a very valuable resource for historical investigations so from my very first day of work I scoured the OED for all evidence of the Philippines and it can be said just by looking at the examples I have on this slide that Filipino borrowings that they found in the OED at the time are still mostly in the Webster word category so they still all refer to plants and animals terms for ethnic origin and cultural items and only a few of them can be considered to form part of our actual everyday vocabulary yeah and then so where do we get the quotations for Philippine words so it depends on how old the word is so if it's old enough so the interesting thing is there are words in the OED that are from the Philippines but date back from even decades before English itself came to the Philippines with the Americans so there are words that have quotation evidence from the 1700s and they come from translations into English of descriptive accounts written in Spanish that have quotations from the 1800s to early 1900s from travel accounts written by English speaking authors have actually traveled to the Philippines and then if you look at the selection of words from the Philippines in the OED it's striking to see the kind of stratification a Philippine vocabulary that Bolton and Butler described in a 2008 article so first you have the temporal stratification so the first layer is the contemporary Philippine English that you all use in the Philippines and then the second layer is the colonial era vocabulary that seems to be the only ones that are represented in dictionaries and then there's also this social stratification that we can see if we compare what sort of words in Philippine English are derived from Tagalog and which ones are derived from Spanish so for instance that words in the OED the Philippine English words in the OED that are from Spanish, they're usually related to law, government and administration so precedente or sala meaning a court room or a court of law whereas those from Philippine languages pertain to the rural environment and beliefs of farmers and fisherfolk so words like unting unting or palay so you can even just by looking at which words get into the dictionary and which languages they come from you can already see the sort of the hierarchies of languages that we have been talking about in the Philippines so Spanish is up there being used by the people who run the country and Tagalog is down there Tagalog and other Philippine English is down there being used by farmers and fishermen and actually one cool thing that you can do now a lot of people tell me that ask me whether there's going to be ever another print edition of the OED I don't know, I'm not officially allowed to say but I don't think so because if we were to publish the third edition that we're working on right now in print it would be up to 40 volumes and who's going to buy 40 volumes of a dictionary so the current edition of the OED is just exclusively available online but I don't know why people are so nostalgic over print dictionaries because I would I still read novels and paper but I would choose a digital dictionary at any time because a digital dictionary allows you to do cool things like this so you can actually by using different categories you create timelines of words in the OED so for example I'm interested in words coming from Tagalog so just by clicking on a few buttons I generated this graph which shows you the 55 Tagalog words currently in the OED when did they come in and so you can see the pattern so I mean it's quite obvious that the early 1900s was the peak of borrowing into English from Tagalog and that actually historically makes sense because the early 1900s was when Americans came and that's when they all started absorbing these Tagalog words into the OED so it's very interesting and you can do that using many other categories if you want to know how many French words are in English there's a lot and how many of them in which century came into the English language you can do that if you want to know how many words from I don't know from baseball came into English and when they came in you can also generate that using this tool so that's really cool anyway so that's what was what the what was the status of Philippine English when I first arrived there but I'm glad to report now that we have started to remedy things and in 2015 the OED published 14 new words and senses from Philippine English which was the largest single batch of items from this variety to be added by the dictionary and this was followed by the publication of dozens more Philippine editions in subsequent quarterly updates now these were inclusions widely covered in the Philippine press and were generally met with a positive response by the Filipino public which is added to the OED in its March 2016 update was one item which attracted a remarkable amount of media attention and it became until now it's one of the dictionary's most consulted entries ever like every time they show us the graph of most visited entries it's like it's there at the top I mean Filipinos with their computers right but the most important thing about this is that in its most recent Philippine updates the OED also extended the scope of its coverage so veering away from the typical Flora and Fauna words to include other semantic domains relevant to Filipino life and culture so from readings to indigenous sports to items of traditional dress and then Philippine food and food customs are also an especially rich source of new words for us and so I can ship terms in terms of address for both men and women so and other newly added words also referred to archetypal Filipino traits and values so just some examples you can see on this slide and Philippine English borrowings can also be highly productive so they readily fuse with other words to create hybrid expressions that combine English and Tagalog and even English and Spanish and although borrowing is predominant the OED also ensured that its selection of new items include examples of other means by which words are created in Philippine English so there's calking for instance or the direct translation of an expression from one language to another so for instance we added the use of the verb to go down a vehicle instead of to get off because Filipinos say if you want to go to Goryeta you have to go down at Ayala station yeah instead of to get off because that's a translation of the Tagalog verb Bumaba because you have the same word for to get off and to go down and also adapt existing English words to express a local concept that's alien to Anglo-American culture so for instance in the use of the expression dirty kitchen to mean not actually a dirty kitchen but one where everyday cooking is done as opposed to the one that's just for show and then English speakers in the Philippines can also completely change the meaning of a word so in the Philippines gimmick is a fun night out in France while to salvage is not to save although that's now an old fashion term we prefer to say EJK or talk hang now and words can also be converted from one part of speech to another so in the Philippines we can use high blood as an adjective so you can say oh this traffic jam is making me high blood and we also we add derivation of affixes like in precedential and we invent new acronyms and initialisms like in KKB so and this small selection of neologisms I hope I've shown how Filipinos experiment with words so that's why I find it very interesting reading Professor Rafael's chapter in Motherless Tongues about the second chapter on words and how he commented on words as play because this is how what I love about Philippine English lecture calligraphy is just the way in which Filipinos experiment with words pull them apart and put them back together then they mix up elements they mix up all the elements from all the language they have at their disposal then they play with meaning they play with function they play with form to express different concepts because the problem with us is we have a deficit mentality when it comes to using English so we feel that since we don't speak like Americans that there must be something wrong with the way that we speak we can't just speak in straight English or straight Tagalog but actually it's not I mean I code-switch not because I can't speak English fully or I can't speak Tagalog fully I code-switch because I can and a lot of people can and when I code-switch it's because of the person I'm talking to it's because of the particular context that we're in it's because of that particular thing I want to express so there is a communicative value to code-switching that somehow people find negative when in fact it's not and perhaps I always get asked as well what my favorite word is and I try not to play favorites with my words but I do have a favorite word and it's one that we added very recently and it's chapel and it's a there well for those of you who don't know what a chapel is and the word fuses together the component words of the English phrase traditional politician but the resulting blend is also the word for a dirty old rag used in Tagalog and other Philippine languages because it self comes from the Spanish word which is still used in Spanish to mean rag So this makes Chapa not only a convenient contraction but also a vivid highly effective metaphor that likens a corrupt politician to a filthy disposable scrap of cloth, which I find really great. And as a word that combines influences from English, Spanish, and Philippine languages, it distills centuries of Philippine political, cultural, and linguistic history into five letters. So it's my favorite word. So the interesting thing about dictionaries in the Philippines is that there the history of lexicography has always been linked to the country's colonial past and post-colonial struggle to establish a unique national identity. I mean, that's why we can't even agree how to spell our own words. And because of this, the national language development is still incomplete and consequently, Philippine national dictionaries lack the prestige that similar dictionaries have in other countries. I mean, we cannot underestimate how the role that NOAA Webster played in making American English distinct from British English, for example. So, but then because of this, American English continues to exert considerable influence on English usage in the Philippines, discouraging many of the stakeholders from investing effort and resources in dictionaries produced at home. So we're still looking at Webster. We don't buy Oxford dictionaries. We'll see how, what we can do about that. But for us, dictionaries are still Webster because we can't provide a better alternative. I think that the addition of the Philippine English lexicon to the OED can help remedy the situation. So first, by incorporating Philippine words into this such a prestigious dictionary means applying its long and renowned dictionary making tradition and cutting edge research methods to the study of Philippine English. And becoming part of the OED will aid in the legitimization of Philippine English as it is an acknowledgement that this particular variety is a worthy of serious linguistic scholarship as older, more established varieties like British and American English. And such recognition can bring about this a change in attitude towards Philippine English and hopefully pave the way to greater acceptance of any locally edited English dictionaries that may be attempted in the future. So, that's it. There is the writing system. Well, actually, the correct term for it is by buying. It's Tagalog, right? And actually, I don't know if you've heard that recently it's just been made law that it's going to be like... Is it still pending? Yeah. I don't know for what reason. I think it's just simple. I think it's great to see it on maybe street signs that if only for aesthetic reasons, I think this script is absolutely beautiful. I love it. But before spending money on that, spend money on studying it first. Spend money on research on it first. Because, really, we don't know that much about it considering that it's our indigenous writing system. So, unfortunately, I don't know that much about it, but there are some words in Philippine English that take back to be pre-colonial Philippines. And one important example is Barangay, which we mentioned earlier. So, Barangay is a pre-Hispanic concept. It comes from a Malay root, meaning the boats that the Malay communities traveled in. And those became the kind of the nuclear use of the pre-colonial Tagalog communities. But the word endured as part of the Philippine political system. And even until now, it's still an important word for us. And from a lexicological perspective, it's very, very productive. Because apart from Barangay, we have Barangay Captain, Barangay Tanod, Barangay Elections, Barangay Certificate. So, a lot of words are created around the concept of Barangay. I think we just had a Barangay election yesterday. And that, too, is a word that we share also with other Austronesian languages that we still use. That's a name for a local chief thing. So, many of these words of Malay still endure in Philippine English today. Datum, really? Datum. But is it like current? Is it like current? It's current? Like someone drives by in a fancy car and goes like, oh, Datum. Oh, that's awesome. I love that. I love that so much. I'm going to use it. I'm going to make it a thing. What's a connoté? Is it for, like, land? That's the thing. Because in Tagalog, Datum implies nobility. You inherit it. It's not. And also, it's a noun in Tagalog. But are you saying that it's an adjective also in Visaya? Okay. So, as I said, I'm not going to talk for long. I was on the last person and it's been a long day. It's been a super interesting day. So, yeah, thanks for organizing it. It's been really interesting hearing all the different papers. Things that I'm working with the Philippines, but I mean studies people. So, my name is Rafael Shakta. I'll start with that. I'm a teaching fellow at UCL, just around the corner in the anthropology department. So, I did my masters and my PhD there, working for independent public arts, non-institutional and institutional practices of art making in the public sphere. My post-doc, which I finished, well, the funding ended quite recently. I had a three-year post-doc where I was exploring contemporary art practices in the Philippines. That was initially supposed to be looking at kind of relationship between politics, religion and art following the Deo Cruz's proteasimo exhibition about five years ago, which was a very famous moment in public culture in the Philippines because the exhibition was eventually closed by Imelda Marcos and there was an exorcism by the Archbishop of Manila. It was a moment where the art world really entered into the public culture of the Philippines more widely. It was also a perfect moment with which to brand my post-doc application to get funding and then when I arrived things changed. And what changed was the Philippines was returning to the Venice Biennale for the first time in 49 years, which was a very grand and important moment for the contemporary art in the Philippines. So I decided that that really should be the main point of focus for my project in that what was super interesting to me was to see how artists in a specific context deal with the wider context of what is now called global art. So global art being the latest manifestation of global art practice, of world art practice, of art practice, traditionally called contemporary art, in a post-1989 context where the art world has moved away from the centres of London, New York and Paris and opened up to Beijing, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, Manila. This is the context that the art world is now inhabiting, which in many ways is a very progressive context where rather than relying on traditional centres, these centres have been displaced. That's the idea of it. So which way should I go with this? Well, I'll continue on that. So one of the things about the context of global art is there's a really strong focus on the idea of the contemporary. I should say, by the way, that this is some videos of the work of Martha Atienza, that's the artist who will be working with myself, Christina, at an exhibition at the United Arab Emirates this year, which I want to come to. So within this sphere of global art, there's a really strong emphasis on the idea of the contemporary, a progressive intention to create a co-evilness throughout the whole sphere of global art. So rather than saying, in a traditional sense, we in the centre of our world in London, New York or Paris, are at the avant-garde. We're ahead of time. And those who please are elated. They're behind time. There's this idea within global art that there is this co-evilness, this contemporary awareness throughout the whole of this wider practice. Now that is following the work of people like Johannes Fabian in anthropology who was really critiquing the background of the main roots of anthropology in particular. I should say I'm an anthropologist, I mentioned that. So one of the things about Johannes Fabian's work where he really introduced this idea that time is used as a weapon. The time is used something with which to create an inequitable balance between the self and the other. So in particular, and within anthropological contexts, you go to the right location. You are co-evil with your informants, your productives. But then you go to the right apartment, you put them in the background. This idea from the whole history of social science that when you go outwards in space, you go backwards in time. And so with this idea, this way the colonialism is used as a weapon historically. Within global art, there is this kind of push towards the contemporary co-evil. However, at the point, within that kind of enforcement of the contemporary, what I found is that this was actually something quite overwhelming. So rather than being something which had albeit a positive intention, it was something that in the location, in the specificity of Manila, I should kind of stress that I was in Manila rather than in the Philippines, in that getting to know a city like that, taking forward the seven months I was there. So I don't know about the Philippine art scene, I know about the Manila art scene. So whilst being there, the specificity of the time of the temporal, not only through my own ethnographic experiences, so traffic, which is particular traffic and internet traffic, the way that you work, the way that you function in that kind of site, being totally determined by the possibilities of speed. So not only in ethnographic context, something that was constantly happening before. So, for example, as I talked about last year, of, you know, threads, trying to send files, video files to a film festival in Hong Kong, Tokyo, the impossibility of that. I was trying to work on projects I was doing here from there, which was probably impossible because my files were huge. I mean, it was then that I realized why all my credit artists had sent me, you know, 150K image files or I would have been 15K image files that I would have wanted. So time, not only being something which, in my locality, was something that came to the fore in my field work, but also something that came forward in my performance, my interlocutor's practice. So, next year, across the way at Brunei Gallery, I'm doing a submission that's an output of one of the outputs of my postcard. So not only not impact, hopefully impact, but output of your frame with the REC system. So this is a project which is not simply about a conclusion of my project, but this is the answer for something that I've done in my pathology. So I think that curation as an epilogist is very important to my practice to find out, to create not only spaces where I can have meetings with people who are never giving me things, not only a space where I can take my interlocutor to the same four days in a room, but a brainstorming project that can steal their time otherwise in that way, but also a space from which I have to learn, I have to have research and current through that. So, that exhibition is all about the latents. It's all about time. It's all about the temporal. It's all about the way that not only within art is there this anxiety of influence is how important. There's this constant worry about what happened before you, but also with the postcolonial context as Homie Barber and many others have discussed how there is this violence and how I've debated how to tie that, how there's always a separation between the centre and the periphery in terms of the temporal dimension. So, all the artists we're working with in the project should be occurring April next year, are all focusing on this to join other work. This is a self-focusing one, the idea of the temporal. So, three very quick examples. There's an artist called Mark Salvatis who I'm working with who produces work in which he, I'd say, excavates time. There are certainly grins that are very much impressive, not simply in a mode of archiving a vocal. Oh my God, they're coming. People are coming. So, excavating, evacuating, abstracting time. So, Mark has worked on the seeds. Are they coming in? They're coming in. Alright, so let's look at this further. Next April, when I gather, when you are not attending, I'll be very, very angry. So, we'll continue the discussion at the conference which Christina and myself will be putting on a big exhibition next year. Thank you and good night.