by MICHAEL L. TAN

ASKED WHAT Filipino culture is like, we sometimes answer, “Three hundred years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood,” suggesting a hybrid culture.

	AMERICAN and Chinese influences blend well in Manila's Chinatown. [photo by Jaileen Jimeno]

There’s an element of ambiguity when we use that description, due in part to the connotations of hybridization or, even more drastically, of “mongrelization.” Often enough, I think it’s not so much the mixing itself that upsets us than the ambiguity of it all: just who is the father? With our mongrel culture, maybe the question should use the plural.

Our fear of ambiguity comes, too, with our unresolved angst with the Spaniards, with the Americans. Our colonized mentality wants to believe we can be proud of what Mother Spain and Mother America left us. We point to Catholicism, to democracy, to English (and sometimes to Spanish), attributing all that to our colonizers. We bring visitors to look at our Spanish churches, drive them through Manila so they can see the grand old buildings built by the Americans and tell them the city was one of the most beautiful in the world before the Second World War.

Then we explain Manila got all bombed out by Americans when they tried to liberate us from the Japanese and then we talk about the military bases and the bars and the Visiting Forces Agreement and Nicole. As for the Spaniards, we love the fine church architecture but we complain about Catholic conservative moralism. We whine about colonialism and colonial mentalities, but do this in English (like I’m doing right now), fretting that we’ve been kept linguistically retarded, unable to develop a national language and, by extension, a national consciousness.

	CATHOLICISM courtesy of Mother Spain. [photo by Jaileen Jimeno]

We yearn for purity, for an authentic Filipino, and it’s not surprising one area we’ve tried to do this is in language. In the 1960s and 1970s, an era of emergent nationalism, we tried to reconstruct a “pure” Filipino, coining words like salumpuwit (chair), Apo Tiktik for senior police detectives and suggesting that names use “Ama” and “Anak” to designate “Senior” and “Junior.”

In the 1980s we sort of settled down but still felt uneasy about anything “foreign.” Was anthropology “agham-tao” or could we settle on “antropolohiya”? Should our colleges be called “dalubhasaan” or “kolehiyo”?

From language we’ve moved into the area of pedigrees, with attempts to reconstruct or even reinvent family trees. An Internet site called the Labor Law Talk Dictionary includes an intriguing IMSCF Syndrome, which means “I am Spanish-Chinese-Filipino syndrome,” described in the Labor Law Talk Dictionary as “ethnic forgery amongst overseas Filipinos.”

The preferred ethnicities tell us again something about our collective anxieties. It used to be that we would create status by invoking mestizo-hood through putative Spanish and American ancestors. But lately, and especially after Corazon Cojuangco Aquino (emphasis on Cojuangco) became president, it has also become useful to have a Limahong or two as well. (Note that a one-syllable surname like Tan or Lim doesn’t quite count.)

THE TIDE of nationalism beginning in the 1960s — which was when we tried to coin a pure Filipino language — also led later to a search for a kind of precolonial purity, preferably with datus, as Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has done.

The historian Benedict Anderson writes about how Filipinos seem to have gone through a lobotomy, a removal of a part of the brain responsible for memory. The amnesia is selective of course; we leave out bits and pieces of our colonial history, and practically all of our precolonial past.

Most Filipinos know little about the precolonial era. In part, this is because of colonialism, both Spanish and American, and the way the precolonial period was depicted as a kind of Dark Age, of ignorant pagan natives running around naked. With the nationalist period of the 1970s, the pendulum swung to the other end as we romanticized the precolonial period in our search for The Authentic Filipino.

It is important, certainly, to go back to our precolonial period, but not to look for a pure Filipino culture. In the first place, the “Filipino” did not come into existence until the 19th century, and initially, it was a term reserved for Spaniards born in the Philippines. Later, it was expropriated by Rizal and other ilustrados, the illuminated bourgeoisie, who could see a Filipino as a loyal subject of Spain.

The roots of what we call Filipino culture today do date back to the precolonial period, and there is still much to do here around archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics to reconstruct that period. But what we have so far is already fascinating, including the way it reflects how our cultures were constantly being hybridized during that time.

There is a persistent myth — unfortunately propagated by early anthropologists — that Philippine culture evolved out of several “waves” of migrants: the Negritos, the Indonesians, the Malays, with suggestions that each wave came in and transplanted, in toto, a whole culture superior to the previous one. This image of our cultural past became even more colorful with stories of the 10 datus of Panay and the Kalantiaw Code, an elaborate if not rather sadistic prescription of punishments for various crimes supposedly formulated by some great datu, possibly of the “Malay” wave.

Kalantiaw and the 10 datus have since been proven to be fabricated, although the Philippine government discontinued its Order of Kalantiaw award only in 2003. The wave theory is no longer accepted by most anthropologists and historians, and is now seen as simplistic, even racist, with its insinuations of “superior” and “inferior” cultures. Filipino culture(s) is an amalgam, the result of different cultures interacting with each other, rather than distinct pre-assembled waves.