President Rodrigo Duterte is against the change of the Philippines'name to Maharlika. President Rodrigo Duterte is against the change of the Philippines'name to Maharlika. Back in 2019 when Rodrigo Duterte was the President of the Philippines, he presented reporters with a really strange proposal.
He suggested that the name of the Philippines be changed. The Republic of Maharlika because Maharlika is a Malay word. And it means more we can say about serenity and peace. Now, this wasn't the first time that a president from the Philippines wanted to change the name of the country.
The time of Marcos, Marcos was right. He wanted to change it to Maharlika. Both presidents wanted to change the name of the Philippines to Maharlika, whereas Duterte liked the name because it was quote more of a concept of serenity and peace.
Marcos liked it simply because it harkened back to the country's pre-colonial past. Why was it so important for both presidents to change the name of the Philippines? And why change it to Maharlika? For me, why do we need to change it? That's what we're proud of and that's what we...
Welcome, my name is Eric Pito and this is Asian American Studies 353, Filipino and Filipino-American Identities. Today we're going to talk about what the Philippines was like before Spain colonized it. Now it's totally possible that you might be asking yourself, what does this have to do with Filipino-American identities? So let's start there. Put aside pre-Hispanic colonialism.
What does Spanish colonialism have to do with Filipino American identities? Well going back to my discussion about the debate between Filipinos living in the United States, whether the word Filipino should be spelled with an F or a P, you know what I'm talking about. Well I argue that that actually originates in the Philippines or more specifically with the name of the country itself. The Philippines.
Why did Duterte and Marcos before him suggest that the Philippines be named Mahalika? This controversy is at the root of why trying to understand what it means to be Filipino is so complicated. This is a problem that countries who have never been colonized have ever been forced to consider. Now think about it. Why would a country agree to live with a name when one of the letters in that name doesn't even exist within their language's alphabet.
The problem literally starts with King Philip II, ruler of Spain from 1527 to 1598. The name the Philippines actually derives from Las Islas Filipinas. That was the original name given to the archipelago after the Spanish explorer Ruy Lopez The Villalobos invaded in 1542. So even now, when Filipinos both in the United States and all over the world have a really difficult time trying to develop a sense of self attached to the Philippines, well that's really really hard for them to do. It's just really complicated. A lot, even today.
The way how you call... Your kitchen tools, how you call the streets, everything that surrounds you has Spanish vestiges. So up to now, even after 150 years since Spain left the Philippines, they left a very big impact. How do you develop a sense of self when you truly don't know where you belong?
If we go by their name alone to be Filipino, literally means to belong to King Philip II. Obviously, that's absurd. So to continue our discussion about Filipino-American identity formation, we have to start from the beginning, before the Philippines and all of its people became the possession of Spain.
But first, let me start by sharing this quote by a really famous anthropologist, Keith Bosso. While he was alive, Bosso didn't write about Filipinos. He wrote about another indigenous society, the Apache people. This is what he wrote, Constructing the past is also a way of constructing social traditions, and in the process, personal and social identities. And here's the important part.
He said, We are, in a sense, the place worlds we imagine. In other words, when we imagine a certain people, say Filipinos, we're imagining the place in which they exist, say the Philippines. Remember what I said about our parents thinking that the Philippines is really only three things?
Hot, polluted, and corrupt? Well, that's a place world. As our parents describe their literal homeland, that's the place we conjure in our minds. as their children or their grandchildren. The thing is this imagining of the Philippines, it's not a new or recent thing.
This place world comes from the fact that from a very long time when people imagined the Philippines before Spain, well they thought of it as a place without a culture. Historian Arnold J. Toynbee said, that the Philippines is a Latin American country that was transported to the Orient by a gigantic marine wave. Many people and some still do believe that the Philippines lacks a truly authentic culture because of their history of colonialism of Spain in the United States. Like many Latin American countries once colonized by Spain, the Philippines is a Hispanic country.
Sat. Patos, reloj, vestida, ventana. These are only some remnants of Spanish colonization.
Many we take for granted. Many we don't even realize. After all, the Spanish didn't just change our speech, clothing, tools, or food. They changed our way of life. Let me tell you about another anthropologist.
Somebody that I really admire. especially in graduate school. His names were not a Rizaldo.
Before he became a professor at Stanford, where he taught for a really long time, he was getting his PhD at Harvard in the 1960s. And when he was there in graduate school choosing his topic, well, his advisor asked him, where do you want to study? So he thought about it for a really long time, and Rizaldo finally decided that he wanted to study tribes in the Philippines.
Well, his advisor scoffed at him, and this is what he said. The Philippines is too westernized to have a culture. Think about that for a second. What does westernized mean?
And what does culture mean? Well, when Rosaldo's advisor at Harvard used the word culture, he didn't mean what the word actually means in everyday language these days. The word culture for Rosaldo's advisor is referring to the term in the way that anthropologists understood it at the time. His advisor meant a structured and authentic way of life.
And by structured, I mean a way of life that was organized in ways that scholars can understand and write about. And by authentic, I mean a set of beliefs and practices within a community or society that's so clearly different from the mixtures of culture that... characterizes so many modern countries that we think of today.
So these sets of beliefs and practices are somehow not modern. For Rosaldo's advisor, the Philippines lost its authentic culture after it was colonized by the Philippines and the U.S. Now there's a third definition of culture that I want to discuss and it's related to the other two definitions.
And that's the idea of a high culture. As in cultured. You can think about this in the way that some people continue to think that countries are actually better off for having been colonized, including the Philippines. Places like the Philippines, for them, were introduced to a superior way of life, a high culture, once they were settled by colonizers, either from Europe or the United States.
Now one of the most celebrated historians, another Renato, Renato Constantino, used this definition of culture to explain just how effective the Spanish policy of Reducción was in getting indigenous people to eventually reject their own native cultural values and adopt Christianity. He claimed that one of the major reasons why indigenous communities Submitted to Spanish colonial rule was because they lacked a high degree of culture, since they were virtually a tabula rasa on which Spanish values were inscribed. Now, I don't know if you were there for that philosophy class in high school, but a tabula rasa is a philosophical idea that human beings come into the world as blank slates.
We are born knowing nothing. and instead all of our knowledge comes to us through sense data. We'll talk more about Spanish colonialism and policies like Reducción next week, but for now I just want you to interrogate what Constantino meant when he says that indigenous communities in the Philippines before Spanish colonialism lacked high culture.
And how is Constantino's definition of culture similar or different to Renato Constantino's professor's definition back in Harvard? The thing is, when someone says that another community or some society lacks culture, I want you to imagine how that same person can rationalize all the terrible things that can be done. to that community or that society thinking that they don't have a culture and are therefore less human. Because sometimes when people talk about culture, they're not talking about this broad idea of how everybody has certain behaviors or sets of practices that are passed down from generation to generation. Sometimes when they use this word culture, they're actually putting that group of people in the spotlight.
in a hierarchy. Civilizing in the Spanish sense, not only of being more human, but by being more human, being more Christian. But what we know now from the many Filipinas and Filipino-Americanists who studied the cultures of the communities who inhabited the Philippines before Spain is that these people did have culture.
and they lived within sophisticated and highly organized societies. So that's why we have to start from the beginning. Before the time the communities of the archipelago collided with the culture of Spanish colonialism, a period of time that a lot of people call the pre-Hispanic Philippines.