Ethnography in the Raw: Life in a Luzon Village 9781800730755

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Ethnography in the Raw

Ethnography in the Raw Life in a Luzon Village

Brian Moeran

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Brian Moeran All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moeran, Brian, 1944- author. Title: Ethnography in the raw : life in a Luzon village / Brian Moeran. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020042400 (print) | LCCN 2020042401 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800730748 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800730755 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Filipinos--Social life and customs--21st century | Filipinos--Social conditions--21st century. | Philippines--Social life and customs--21st century. | Philippines--Social conditions--21st century. | Luzon (Philippines)--Rural conditions. Classification: LCC DS663 .M64 2021 (print) | LCC DS663 (ebook) | DDC 959.9/1--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042400 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042401 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-074-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-075-5 ebook

For Nana With love and thanks for accepting me as I am, and For caring for me in my later years

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgements xi Notes on Text

xii

Prologue

1

Chapter 1 Beginnings

7

Chapter 2 People

9

Chapter 3 The Barangay 18 Chapter 4 Buying a Car

27

Chapter 5 Kinship Terms and Names

33

Chapter 6 Tying the Knot

39

Chapter 7 Family

46

Chapter 8 For Richer, For Poorer

53

Chapter 9 Chaos and Laughter

58

Chapter 10 Language Use

61

Chapter 11 New Year’s Eve

65

Chapter 12 Mobile Phones and Social Media

71

Chapter 13 Irrigation 78 Chapter 14

Rice and Classification

84

Chapter 15

Going for a Walk

93

Chapter 16

A Pillow Tree

97

Chapter 17

Actually

99

viii • Contents

Chapter 18 Spirits

104

Chapter 19

Birthday Parties

109

Chapter 20

No Money, No Hangover

123

Chapter 21

Wiping and Weeping

124

Chapter 22 Circumcision

125

Chapter 23

131

Blackness

Chapter 24 Japan

136

Chapter 25

The Author of Life

142

Chapter 26

Oh, George!

143

Chapter 27 OFWs

145

Chapter 28

Of Cocks and Men

156

Chapter 29

Religious Side Bets

181

Chapter 30

The Foreigner at Large

186

Chapter 31

She Love You, She Crazy

191

Chapter 32

Valentine’s Day

193

Chapter 33

Crispin, Caesar and Cecilio

201

Chapter 34 Drugs

203

Chapter 35

Cementeries 211

Chapter 36

Security Guards

217

Chapter 37 Elections

223

Chapter 38 Beliefs

238

Chapter 39

A Shotgun Wedding

243

Chapter 40

Feria 249

Epilogue

263

References

269

Index

275

Figures 2.1. Nana and JR.

10

2.2. Tuto, in taong putik, mud festival attire.

12

2.3. Teté, with Blessica (rt).

14

3.1. Distant view of Bibiclat across rice fields.

19

3.2. Drying rice on the road.

21

3.3. Nana’s house.

22

3.4. Bahay kubo, ‘cube house’.

23

3.5. Malou and Kambal’s house, with sari sari kiosk in front.

25

4.1. Family outing made possible by the Mitsubishi Xpander.

31

6.1. The happy couple with their sponsors.

40

6.2. ‘You may kiss the bride’.

43

6.3. Tying the knot with 1,000 peso notes.

44

8.1. Dressed to kill? Teté and JR.

54

11.1. Tuto and Gusto roasting a pig.

67

11.2. Party time.

69

12.1. Sherwin, without mobile phone.

72

13.1. Leading a carabao to water.

79

13.2. Irrigated fields.

80

14.1. Viola, Telay, Blessica, Nana and Gianna share a hotel bed.

89

15.1. Out in the tumana, with acacia tree.

94

16.1. Blessing sought and given at the Mud Festival.

98

17.1. Actually. 100

x • Figures

19.1. Bottles up! Lyn, with friend Alfonso.

113

19.2. Sunshine, Yoyo and Nicholas, with baby Yosh and Chickie Boy.

119

22.1. The hanging bridge, site of Tuto’s circumcision.

129

24.1. Japanese furniture outlet, with Mitsubishi Xpander.

139

27.1. Kambal, the twin.

150

27.2. Nana (rt), with fellow OFW friends in Hong Kong.

153

28.1. An impromptu cockfight.

161

28.2. Boshio, the tiler.

162

28.3. Individual betting at the World Slasher Cup.

163

28.4. Two cocks facing off in the ring before a World Slasher Cup fight.

171

34.1. ‘No drug user grow old’.

204

35.1. Bibiclat cemetery.

212

36.1. Security guard at local shopping mall.

218

39.1. Telay being coy.

246

40.1. Mud Festival supplicants praying.

252

40.2. Mud Festival church service.

255

40.3. Malou, Nana and Avelina as ‘mud people’.

257

40.4. A carabao at full speed.

260

Acknowledgements I wish to thank all members of the ‘Aquinez’ family for having me as a somewhat elderly and foreign relative living in their midst, and for accepting the differences between us. And also their friends and relatives, who have done their best to answer my interminable questions and become my friends in the process. All author royalties from this book will go to the people of Bibiclat, as a very small token of my appreciation for their seemingly indestructible good humour in the face of their lives’ very many difficulties.

Notes on Text For the record, all the names of the people mentioned in this book are fictional. There are two exceptions. One of them is a public figure, the Mayor of Aliaga. The other is a local villager and friend who is happy about my using his common name. In writing this book I have chosen, for ease of reading, to dispense with the customary use of citations when discussing anthropological theories, and to make use instead of a section-by-section list of Readings at the end of the book. Since the absence of citations in a text tends to make academics (and, perhaps, students) unhappy, I had probably better explain why I have adopted such a course of action. First and foremost, this is a book detailing the everyday life of a fieldworker. As such, it is filled with details that often at the time seem insignificant and only later may, or may not, take on importance in the context of the research as a whole. Ethnographic data, therefore, are the be-all and end-all of anthropological theories based on fieldwork. They should, in my opinion, underpin and guide any theorising that later takes place. I learned this important lesson when, as a doctoral student, I was told by my supervisor to write my thesis while I was still in the field. I had been fortunate enough to be granted a fellowship by a Japanese foundation for a second year of fieldwork. Since my supervisor was going to be in Tokyo for several months during that period, he thought it advisable that I write up the first draft of my thesis while he was in Japan and while I still had time to enquire further into research areas that I may not have fully followed up until then. He gave me three months to complete the task. ‘I want a complete thesis’, he said, ‘with beginning, middle, and end. And make it readable’. And so I wrote a thesis while living in a remote valley in Kyushu in the south of Japan. I had no access to any academic books and therefore had to rely entirely on my fieldnotes to meet my supervisor’s demands. So I allowed these fieldnotes to tell their own story as I sifted through all my notebooks (remember, this was before the age of computers and

Notes on Text • xiii

the Internet). Two days prior to the deadline, I sent my supervisor a complete thesis with beginning, middle and end. (In fact, I had two beginnings, two middles and more or less two ends, because I hadn’t then worked out how to integrate the social organisation of a pottery village with an aesthetic philosophy of folk art that guided ‘my’ potters’ everyday work and social interaction.) Writing a thesis without a single book to help or hinder my reflections was, I still think, the best thing that ever happened to me and over the years I’ve advised my students to do the same when embarking upon their own thesis writing. (None of them has ever followed this advice!) Such an approach makes for a more readable story. It also shows clearly why its author adopts one theory rather than another when engaging with the ‘serious’ side of his or her discipline. Nowadays, of course, the Internet, computers and related digital media have radically changed the fieldwork experience. As fieldworkers, we are no longer totally cut off from the outside world, but allow it to impinge upon our everyday experiences. It is, therefore, possible to get hold of and read articles, even books, related to fieldwork interests and to incorporate them into one’s reflections about where a particular set of ethnographic data might be leading in terms of theory. The question is: how should this written material be incorporated in fieldwork that is still ongoing? Should you give it the finality that citations in the text itself impose? Or, given that your fieldwork is ongoing and that a different interpretation may emerge at a later stage of fieldwork, as well as after you have returned to the womb-like cocoon of a university, should you merely hint at the written material that has guided your reflections in the field? For better or for worse, I have decided to opt for the latter course of action and include those readings that guided me in a chapter-bychapter bibliography at the end of this book. Already, a year and a half after embarking upon fieldwork in Bibiclat (which has now amounted to a full twelve months in the classical tradition of anthropology), I feel hesitant about some of my preliminary conclusions. If I were to read more and study more, I might well change them. As a result, I do not feel confident enough about what I have written to put citations of any kind in the text that you have before you. There is another reason for this decision. Citations, these days, are very much the business of academia, both in their quantity and their status. Whether a particular scholar is cited at all, how often s/he is so, and in which journals, has a bearing on their academic appointments and promotions, and, less directly, on the management and structure of universities themselves (through the appointment of department

xiv • Notes on Text

heads and faculty deans who may initiate structural changes affecting the lives of the staff under their command). In addition, however, citations are used to display the other side of the business of academia: an appearance of scholarship. Scholarship involves the advancement of human knowledge of a particular subject or discipline. As such, it has become customary to make reference in a new body of knowledge to what it claims to supersede. At the same time, however, because of the enormous expansion of tertiary education over the past six decades, more and more, lesser and lesser advances in knowledge have been published. This has led to a felt need for more and more citations, where numerous minor intermediate stages of advances in scholarship are often mentioned, in addition to the comparatively few major advances. This has led to a major issue in what passes for scholarship in contemporary academia. Authors provide citations in order to show that they are up to date and au fait with what is going on in their field of research. But there is a tendency for them (and here I include myself) to cite for the sake of showing off one’s disciplinary competence, rather than to engage with the works and authors cited. This citation for citation’s sake leads all to easily to secondary citation, where authors cite works that they have seen cited in other books and journal articles, but which they have not themselves read. In Ethnography in the Raw, I do not engage with what other authors have said about different aspects of Philippine society. I merely refer to what they have written and use their insights to frame my own understandings of what is going on about me in the village of Bibiclat. It is precisely for this reason, too, that I have decided not to include citations in the text, but references at the end of the book. In addition, a number of concepts that I make use of in the chapters that follow – ‘reciprocity’, for example, ‘spheres of exchange’ and ‘betwixt and between’ (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins and Victor Turner respectively) – I regard as such central ideas in our discipline that I have not referenced them at all. My apologies to those who think my scholarship, such as it is, should have been more painstaking in this regard.

Prologue From the beginning of December 2018, I spent four months in Bibiclat – a large, sprawling village in the rice basin of Nueva Ecija in the Philippines, just over 130 miles north-east of Manila. This is where my wife was born and brought up, and where, after working for many years in Hong Kong, she had decided to build her own home. I went back to her village twice over the next year, and spent a further nine weeks there (and am here again for another five months now). This book describes the people I’ve met in Bibiclat, and the things that they’ve said and done in their everyday lives there. Although these weren’t my first trips to the Philippines, they were the first occasion there when I found myself confined to one place and obliged to make sense of an alien world in which I was living with my Filipina wife and various members of her extended family. The only way I could do this successfully was by making use of my training as a social anthropologist. I should perhaps add, by way of introduction to those who don’t already know me or my work, that I am Anglo-Irish, trained in anthropology at London University, and have been coming and going to Japan for well over half a century. It is in Japan that most of my previous anthropological fieldwork has been conducted – primarily on folk-art pottery, art marketing, advertising, incense production and international fashion magazines – but the last research project took me also to Hong Kong, Paris and New York. I’ve also done research on book fairs and other kinds of trade fairs and festivals in England, Germany and Hong Kong (where I have lived and taught for over a decade), and written about a ceramist in Denmark and her ‘creative encounter’ with Royal Copenhagen. As you might anticipate from my somewhat chequered career, life in Bibiclat wasn’t totally alien, at least not in terms of personal experience. I had lived in a remote country valley in Kyushu, Japan, for four years back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I did my doctoral research on the interaction between a pottery community

2 • Ethnography in the Raw

and the Japanese mingei, or folk art, movement, and also wrote an ethnographic diary of my life in the valley (a book which I can still read with a little pleasure). But in Japan I’d had the advantage of being able to speak, read and write Japanese fairly fluently, and so could engage in all sorts of conversations directly with the local inhabitants among whom I lived. In Bibiclat, even though – I was assured – local people had all been to school and taken classes in English, I discovered that very few of them could converse with ease in my own language. They preferred to speak Tagalog and usually struggled with English, which they would laughingly say made their ‘noses bleed’. And so I found myself having to learn the basics of Tagalog. Luckily for me, though, this language includes a lot of Spanish loanwords, as well as whole phrases in English inserted by speakers seemingly at random. This has on occasion allowed me to follow the general gist, if not the detail, of a conversation, which I have then had others elaborate on at greater length in English. It’s not a perfect way to carry out research in a foreign language and country, but it’s the best I’ve been able to come up with during this past year. Hopefully, one day, I’ll reach a level of ability in Tagalog that has served me so well in Japanese, and perhaps write a more analytical book about Philippine society. Because I’ve been participating in everyday life and observing how people around me interact with one another, I’ve often found myself reflecting on different aspects of life here in this village. Still, as an ethnographer obliged to adapt to people and circumstance, and to making both the strange familiar and the familiar strange, I have on occasion forgotten just how alien some customs and events are to others. Friends back in England, for example, raised the occasional sceptical eyebrow when I sent them extracts from my journal. Somewhat surprisingly for someone brought up on Clifford Geertz’s ‘Notes on the Balinese cockfight’, my description of cockfights in the Philippines appalled my vegetarian friends. So let me warn those of you with similar concerns to skip that section – although to do so will mean your missing out on an important theoretical reflection on sacrifice. And yet, at the same time, my description of the cockfight is a good example of how the familiar – an ordinary chicken – becomes a rather strange bird in a different environment (although it is totally familiar to those concerned in that environment). The same can be said, I think, of my descriptions of, among other things, circumcision, migrant workers and Valentine’s Day – all of which are present in our everyday lives in Europe and the United States, but which we tend to take for granted until we find them reappearing in a strange environment where people behave in somewhat unfamiliar ways.

Prologue • 3

The cockfight is, in fact, a good example of how everyday objects, actions and events are constantly oscillating between familiarity and strangeness in our lives. When I first read Geertz’s description, I was struck by the strangeness of the event. Why should people want to encourage their chickens to fight? And why chickens? Why not dogs? But, in the context of my study of anthropology at the time, I was becoming familiar with this and other accounts of strange cultural activities around the world. This familiarity led me to overlook how strange my own account must seem to others not versed in our discipline and made me, too, see it again as somehow strange. At the time I encountered the cockfight, two months into my stay in Bibiclat, sacrifice struck me as a potentially useful concept, or trope, with which to understand other aspects of Philippine society. It seemed to fit in with what I’d already learned about male circumcision and Filipinos working overseas, so I developed the idea. You can imagine, then, how pleased I was with myself as an ethnographer when I later discovered through Internet and university library searches that other researchers had, in one context or another, said much the same. This encouraged me to compare my observations here with those of other scholars writing about other customs among other peoples in other parts of the world, as well as in the Philippines itself. This brings me to the crux of why I’ve written this book. Over the years, when doing fieldwork – whether among folk art potters, or incense manufacturers, in an advertising agency, or travelling round the northern hemisphere talking to the editors of international fashion magazines – I have, like many of my colleagues, always made two kinds of notes: one dealing with the ‘serious stuff’ (the complex relationships among those involved in the production, marketing and aesthetic appraisal of folk art pottery, for example); the other a journal of casual observations (about life in a Japanese pottery village and the valley in which it was located). Later, back home, when going through both types of notes, I’ve found that the ‘casual observations’ of my journals have sometimes provided pointers for the direction that my ‘serious stuff’ (theoretical analyses) might usefully take. In other words, these two kinds of records – field notes and journal – are not separate, but complement each other and are, to my way of thinking, of equal theoretical importance. As a result, budding anthropologists, as well as their seasoned seniors, should, I think, pay much more attention to, and be prepared to publish and seriously discuss, ethnography in the raw. Alas! Although there is a developing interest in anthropologists’ styles of writing, this isn’t often the case. Within a discipline devoted to

4 • Ethnography in the Raw

participant observation as a method of study – a method now taken up by numerous other disciplines – it is, ironically, the ‘serious stuff’ that gets read and discussed ad nauseam, while those casual observations of daily life ‘in the field’ that enable the discipline’s theorising tend to be ignored entirely or reduced to a mechanical chapter on research methods in a monograph. This jettisoning of raw detail obtained during fieldwork can give rise, I think, to a kind of intellectual masochism that, as anthropologists, we could well do without. It also produces a mass of books that are in large part unreadable because of their theoretical jargon. (Non-native English-speaking anthropologists writing in English as their second language tend to be the exception to this general rule.) In our disregard, occasionally contempt, for our real life experiences as ethnographers, we not only give our discipline a bad name; we allow other disciplines to hijack the concept of participant observation and ‘thick description’ and mould it to their own, often rather shallow, ends. First impressions are always important when doing fieldwork – whether in a rural community like Bibiclat, or a business corporation like Asatsū, the Japanese advertising agency I studied back in 1990. These impressions need to be recorded at once before what is at first novel becomes routine and later overlooked, even ignored. This is because they often have a bearing on later discoveries or discussions. The five o’clock dirges broadcast from the tower of the local Catholic church in Bibiclat, for example, act as a precursor to what I later have to say about religious institutions and beliefs. Similarly, the crowing of cocks all over the village before dawn – why are there so many cocks crowing? – heralds my description and analysis of cockfights. At the time, though, I had no idea of the importance of either. I was merely, like the oyster, annoyed by their noisy noise when all I wanted to do was sleep. Another set of observations worth recording right from the start of fieldwork is what used to be referred to, a bit negatively, as ‘palm tree anthropology’. What is it about the place in which you’re conducting your fieldwork that makes it interesting? And in what ways interesting? What kind of people live there? Why are they there in the first place, and what keeps them there? Questions like these can throw light on community, family, friendship and other forms of organisational structure, as well as on work patterns and larger issues of financial wherewithal and the economy. A second aspect of palm tree anthropology concerns people. What kind of people do you meet in your fieldwork location? If we accept the etymological definition of anthropology as ‘the study of people’s

Prologue • 5

words’, then who these people are whom you talk to during fieldwork (those objectified ‘informants’) has a bearing on everything that, as ethnographer, you have yourself to say. What encourages them to tell you what they tell you? What ulterior motives (if any) may they have? Why on earth should they want to spend their time talking to you in the first place? And how and why do they interact with one another in the ways that they do? Early character sketches can be filled in as you get to know someone better. Well-formed characters can illuminate what might well have otherwise been turgid theorising in a monograph. This sort of approach is what I like to refer to as ethnography in the raw. It is the fruit not of participant observation so much as of observant participation – a transition in methodological practice that every fieldworker should aspire to, but which usually ends up being hard earned. As I’ve recounted previously when writing about my fieldwork experiences in the Japanese ceramic art world and an advertising agency, this shift from participant observation to observant participation brings about a parallel movement in both activities and understandings of those being studied, from what Erving Goffman called ‘front stage’ to ‘back stage’. In Bibiclat, precisely because I was immediately incorporated into a Philippine family which had spent the best part of half a century embedded in village life, I found myself at once back stage as I carried out my ethnography in the raw. However, unlike almost all of my earlier work, this book consists only of the ‘casual’ kind of observations of everyday life in a Luzon village and does not pretend to offer a detailed objective analysis of family structure and kinship terms, land ownership, irrigation and labour exchange, classificatory and political systems, and religious beliefs and practices, although all of these topics (plus several more) make their appearance on the stage on which life in Bibiclat is performed. What the book does do, I think, is show how such casual observations can give rise to unanticipated insights and ‘lateral’ reflections, which themselves can provide the impetus for more sustained theoretical analyses of different aspects of Philippine society. If the following pages succeed in doing this, I will have done my job as an ethnographer, if not as an anthropologist (and, yes, I differentiate between the two). This book, then, is for two kinds of readers. First, it is for students of anthropology who wonder what it must be like to carry out fieldwork in a foreign country when they have an incomplete grasp of its people’s language. It reveals the curiosities of an unfamiliar culture, the fieldworker’s frustrations and delights, and the ways in which

6 • Ethnography in the Raw

different forms of activity open themselves up to unanticipated kinds of anthropological analysis. But this book is also for a second kind of reader who is not necessarily an (aspiring) anthropologist, but who retains a sense of curiosity about life in general. It is for intelligent laymen and women who are interested in learning about what it’s like to live in a country whose existence reaches their consciousness only when they hear about a volcanic eruption or a major typhoon striking the islands; or encounter a Filipina nurse in their local hospital; or decide to hire a nanny to look after their young children. These days, too, President Duterte’s drugs war and support of extradition killings also get a few mentions in the media, but that’s about it when it comes to knowledge of the Philippines in England and the rest of Europe, and even the United States (which has a large Filipino-American community). In another life, I used to have fairly lengthy conversations with a curious, intelligent and politically aware Greek island baker of the kind I imagine this second kind of reader to be. One day, he was asking me about a book I was then writing. Would he be able to read it? That question stopped me in my tracks. It changed my attitude to both the writing of anthropology and my academic career, as I decided there and then to forsake grand theorising and let common sense prevail. As Yiorgos mused philosophically, while putting a cheese pie into a paper bag for me: ‘Books are written to be read, Brian, not written in the head.’ Yea, verily. Brian Moeran Bibiclat 27 January 2020

1

Beginnings Where and how to begin? With the endless stream of people coming to the house – relatives and friends mostly, but also acquaintances, even the occasional stranger, dropping by? With the equally endless noise of motorbikes, or motor, with or without their passenger sidecars, piled high with people or goods (sacks of cement, rice and onions, building materials or furniture of some kind, and even the occasional pig)? With the luxuriant foliage of mango, coconut and banana trees, and the maya birds (such a nice name for mere sparrows!) chattering unseen among them? With the total flatness of the landscape which makes parts of the Baltic look almost mountainous? With the darting looks, the smiles, from children as they catch my eye in the street when I go for my evening stroll? With the fits of helpless laughter into which Clara and her sisters fall at the slightest, sometimes seemingly no, provocation? With the ritual blessing – the taking and raising of my hand to the brow – which, as an older man, I’m expected to bestow on all relatives younger than me, as well as on children? With the dirge-like songs (if that is the word) from the loudspeaker outside the Catholic church calling worshippers to mass well before dawn, when even the cocks are wondering if it is yet time to crow? Or with the rather charming use of the Tagalog ‘filler word’ of respect, po, which is added happily to English phrases, like ‘thank you po’, ‘good afternoon po’, and ‘bye bye po’? How does one make sense of an alien environment, and of the people who live in it, when they seem unable to speak more than rudimentary English, even though this was their language of instruction in school, and when my own knowledge of their language, Tagalog, is virtually

8 • Ethnography in the Raw

non-existent (although helped immensely in terms of vocabulary by my having lived in Spain for a couple of years back in the mid-1960s)? I guess all I can do, really, is ‘go with the flow’ and do what, as an anthropologist, I’ve been trained to do: participate in everyday life and observe what people do, how they do it, and what happens as a result. I like to call this observant or ‘perceptive participation’. It’s what all travellers and ethnographers should do. Think of what follows, then, as a can of lager beer. As I understand them, true beer devotees – I do not profess to be one myself – don’t regard lager as a ‘proper’ beer. So far as they’re concerned, ‘light’ lager should be treated with total disdain – in the way that ethnographies, as opposed to more ‘serious’ theoretical articles, are treated by those who like to classify themselves as ‘proper’ anthropologists. But there are many, many more people who don’t drink beer regularly, but who like an occasional sip and opt for the light version of what is on offer in their local pub or bar. These people, hopefully, will be my readers – intellectually curious and intelligent, but not overly scholarly, pretentious even. This book is for you. And thank you for taking the trouble to read it.

2

People Late in life, I’ve married into a sprawling extended Filipino family, many of whose members live in an equally sprawling and extended barangay – village or barrio – called Bibiclat. Others live in Makati and other districts of Metro Manila, the capital of the Philippines, but come and go regularly between their homes and Bibiclat, their natal village. There is, then, a reciprocal relation between central Manila and outlying rural towns and villages, not unlike that noted of Ireland back in the 1930s: country people flock into the capital to find work, often starting families in the process, but when as city people they retire, they die – or, at least, are buried – outside it. Bibiclat is located in the middle of the province of Nueva Ecija, the ‘rice basin’ of central Luzon. This basin radiates out from the barangay for somewhere between 40 and 100 miles in each direction. It is totally flat, with the exception of a single, hopefully extinct, small volcano jutting out from the horizon some twenty miles away to the south-west, and a low mountain range, visible on a clear day, to the north-east. The main protagonists of my story about life in Bibiclat were all born and spent their early lives here. Clara Aquinez is my wife. Two of her sisters live in a nearby barangay, but the older of the two has been abroad visiting her daughter in Korea during the past year. Three other sisters have married out into the Flores, Rosario and Simbulan families and live in Makati and adjacent neighbourhoods in Manila, but they and their children still keep in close contact with Clara and her two brothers in the village. Family members come and go quite frequently, as do the nephews and nieces living in Bibiclat itself. Clara and I are rarely alone.

10 • Ethnography in the Raw

As you will have already noticed, Clara’s family name is Spanish. Like many other surnames in Bibiclat and nearby barangay, Aquinez owes its origins to the Spanish colonisation of the Philippines back in the mid-sixteenth through to the very end of the nineteenth centuries. It is probably a hybrid linking two families, Aquino with Marquez. The local cemetery reveals a plethora of similar Iberian names – Hermano, Castro, Fuentes, Viernes, Aguilar, Pascual – although nobody knows how they got them in the first place. Indentured labour to Spanish landowners, perhaps, way back in time? As I said, nobody knows. History isn’t written with poor farmers in mind. But nobody seems to care either. The Aquinez family, and the families the Aquinez sisters have married into – Flores, Rosario, and Simbulan – are who they are. It is who they are exactly, what they and other villagers like them get up to in their everyday lives, and why they do the things that they do, in the ways that they do them, that are the subject of this book. Because many protagonists make their entrances and act out parts on the stage that is Bibiclat, I should probably indulge in what, in its time perhaps a little negatively, has been called ‘palm tree anthropology’, and give you portraits of the main actors. Hopefully, it’ll help you remember a few of the names that litter these pages, although I have a feeling that some are so memorable they can never be forgotten. Clara Ocampo Aquinez is the youngest of Agapito Aquinez and Arsenia Ocampo’s eight children. Now forty-eight years old, she has five sisters and two brothers, all of whom seem to hold her in awe. Born in the Year of the Wild Boar, she is one of the most determined

Figure 2.1. Nana and JR. © Brian Moeran.

People • 11

people I’ve met in my life. She’s also extraordinarily kind and refuses to complain when things go wrong, as they tend to do, or when others try to take advantage of her, generally not something they think of doing twice. Clara and I met in Hong Kong where she was living and working as a domestic helper for a French family, looking after two young girls who worshipped their ‘Nana’ – the name she wants me to use for her from here on. I was teaching part-time at the University of Hong Kong and, at the request of a Japanese friend, had taken on a Filipina parttime help, Marisa, to clean my apartment and iron my clothes for a couple of hours every other week. One day, when we were both at home, Marisa asked if I lived alone (I’d thought it obvious). When I said yes and asked her why she asked, she said she had a friend who was about her age, who wasn’t fat (Marisa herself was tending that way), who was very kind, and who’d never been married. Wouldn’t I like to meet her? In due course, a meeting was arranged between us – on a playground in Mui Wo, the village on southern Lantau island where we both lived. Nana’s first question when we came face to face was, as I’ve now come to expect, straight to the point: ‘Are you a Catholic?’ I answered ‘No’, and thought that that probably was that. It wasn’t, though. In spite of the fact that I’m not a Catholic and that we’re totally different people, I found myself drawn to Nana’s outlook on life and into the world of her domestic worker friends. I quickly learned to admire their qualities – qualities that I have since encountered time and time again among the people of the Philippines: an extraordinary ability to smile and laugh in the face of adversities, ranging from political cronyism and employers’ unreasonable demands on their time, to typhoons, floods and other natural disasters. In due course, during one of her annual two-week holidays back home, Nana and I got married (in a sort of Catholic church – more of which later). It says something about her modesty and sense of privacy, I think, that Nana never told her French employers that she’d got married, nor even explained why she didn’t wish to renew her contract when it expired, but had decided to go back home at the end of the following year. So Nana came back to the house that she had been building in Bibiclat with the money she’d saved over the years while working in Hong Kong. It wasn’t finished, of course – houses here rarely are – but it was somewhere to live and, with my help, have painted and furnished, as well as have properly completed during the time in which events in this book take place.

12 • Ethnography in the Raw

Figure 2.2. Tuto, in taong putik, mud festival attire. © Brian Moeran.

People • 13

Tuto is the elder of the two boys who were finally born to Agapito and Arsenia a few years before Nana. After five girls, the parents must have been mightily relieved to have a boy – to judge from the name they gave their first son: Restituto Buenaventura. This was quickly adapted to Resti by his friends – a not uncommon feature of life among Filipinos when it comes to names. Family members, however, prefer to call him Tuto, so Tuto he will be. Tuto is now fifty-two years old. Small and wiry, he has a bristling moustache which, even though he occasionally shaves it off on a whim, grows back very quickly. Like many others whose jobs consist of fairly hard labour, he has no fat on his stomach, and, even though he covers the whole of his body, including his head, when working out in the sun, his skin is an extremely dark, dusky brown in colour. Married to Avelina, whom he describes as ‘my love, my light’, Tuto has three children – two older boys, both army recruits, and a seventeen-year-old daughter, Telay, who goes to school in Makati and lives with, and is looked after by, his second oldest sister, Viola. He also has an old Nokia mobile phone which is used for the sole purpose of communicating with – or, more strictly speaking, being communicated with by – his wife. Now that her children are grown up and have left home, Avelina has found work as a live-in maid for a rich ChineseFilipino family in the city of Cabanatuan, three quarters of an hour away from Bibiclat. She calls her husband every evening – and sometimes during work when she has nothing else to do – and talks endlessly, while Tuto, who can himself be very chatty, listens in near silence. She comes back for the occasional weekend in the barangay. Tuto is a gentle soul. He has a fighting cock which he strokes lovingly every morning before work on the house, and which he laughingly claims will one day win him 10,000 pesos in one of the local cockfight arenas (more of which later). In his spare time, he likes to garden and, soon after our arrival, planted chillies, aubergines, tomatoes and onions in the patch of land behind Nana’s house. Tuto then, like Nana – indeed, like all his siblings – is extremely hard-working, but he isn’t good at saving what little money he earns. Part of the trouble is that he likes to drink. This may make him the life and soul of any party or family gathering, but he tends to get so drunk that he misses work the following day. For this Nana roundly scolds him and occasionally withholds his wages in disgust. Even though he’s a man, and older than his sister, he meekly accepts her punishment. What is, is and cannot be changed. Blessica Aquinez Flores is Tuto’s and Nana’s next sister up in order of birth. It is hard to know how to even begin to describe Blessica.

14 • Ethnography in the Raw

Bespectacled, short, with a splendid rubber tyre of fat around her waist, she is in her mid-fifties and widowed, with four children – two boys (one still only twelve) sandwiching in age twin sisters just out of their teens. She always has a smile on her face and, when she comes to help Nana cook for the painters for a couple of months in the New Year, the whole house and everyone around her are awash with laughter every day. A Born Again Christian, Blessica does her best to use English in my presence. This can lead to some delightful mistakes – one or two of which are recorded here – and she is invariably the first to collapse with laughter when she realises her error. There are times when she and Nana are rendered speechless at the dinner table as they become convulsed with infectious laughter over something one of them has said. But Blessica’s life hasn’t been all wine and roses by any means. One evening, when Nana was drinking with Tuto and the painters, she told me a sad story. Two years ago, her husband, Franklin, had finally died from diabetes after a very long illness. For almost twenty years, she had looked after him almost continuously, taking him to see specialists, visiting him during his frequent incarcerations in hospital. She’d had

Figure 2.3. Teté, with Blessica (rt). © Brian Moeran.

People • 15

to sell her jewellery to pay for his treatment. In his final days, though, she took him out of hospital and back to his own bed where she could lovingly care for him. His final words, before he closed his eyes and died, were ‘thank you’. Now she lives off the tiny life insurance taken out by Franklin, supplemented by the money earned by three of her grown-up children. Blessica herself hasn’t just been a housewife, though. She worked for many years for a sock manufacturer in Makati, and so has earned herself an additional small pension when she reaches sixty in a few years’ time. Although her home is now in Cavite, on the southern side of Metro-Manila, she likes to come back to Bibiclat because many of her childhood friends are here, and she can often be found sitting outside with one or two of them after work has finished and it has grown dark. It’s said that she has a ‘secret admirer’ working in Saudi Arabia and that when he comes back to the Philippines, perhaps he’ll marry her. I hope this turns out to be true. Blessica is an absolute sweetie-pie! Theresa Aquinez Rosario, or Teté, is Blessica’s immediately older sister. Although she briefly worked in Manila after she’d finished school, Teté soon met her future husband Felix, and went to live in Visoria, a rural barangay about ten miles away by road, although much closer as the crow flies. It takes about an hour on foot from Bibiclat to Visoria, but to get there, you have to wade thigh-deep through a fairly broad, sometimes fast flowing, river. Teté used to make this trip quite often when her parents were still alive, following the concrete road that leads, as straight as a die, out of the centre of Bibiclat into the rice, tomato and onion fields before hitting the river bank, a mile and a half away. Like many of her sisters, Teté is short and plump. Perhaps this isn’t surprising; she’s an excellent cook. Now almost sixty, she likes to put on lipstick and makeup, and often wears a ring or other piece of jewellery. She also likes to gamble and often comes over to Bibiclat on her motorbike to play cards with former neighbours and classmates at school. In other words, she gets around, and is usually the first in the family to know what’s been going on in Bibiclat, even though she doesn’t live here. Local people seem to look up to Teté. She’s been asked to stand as barangay captain in her own village, but has said ‘no’ quite firmly; she dislikes politics and politicians. Teté has given birth to six children – four boys and two girls. All of them, with the exception of Sherwin, her youngest boy who’s just turned seventeen, have grown up and married. Her third son, Ace, now

16 • Ethnography in the Raw

lives in her home in Visoria where he helps her rear pigs. The others live in neighbouring towns and one of her daughters has moved to Nova Scotia in Canada, to which country’s immigration department Teté is now applying for a visitor’s visa. Why so drastic a step? Because, two years ago, her husband Felix was shot and killed in his rice field behind their house by an unidentified motorcyclist. I’ll relate this story in fuller detail later on, but the long and the short of it is that Felix’s murderer is still at large, and is unlikely to be caught. Moreover, Teté herself has recently been the object of enquiry in her village by another (or, possibly, the same) unidentified motorcyclist. In spite of all the laughter, in spite of all the smiles, the Philippines is also a land of potential violence and danger, as Nana continually reminds me. Violania Aquinez Simbulan, or Viola, the second oldest of the Aquinez sisters, lives in a small two-story ‘town house’ in Makati, central Manila. ‘Town house’ is very definitely not the right way to describe the cramped two-up, two-down living space, sandwiched between similar arrangements in a sort-of-apartment block facing a side road in this densely crowded barrio of the city. She lives there with her husband, Augusto or Gusto, and their three grown-up children: two sons, Alex and Eric, and their younger sister, Gianna, who designed Nana’s house in Bibiclat during her first year studying architecture at university and who has now qualified as a professional architect. Viola provided the land for this house and intends to build her own home there once her husband, who is chauffeur for a rich Chinese family, retires in a couple of years’ time. Like her sisters, Viola is short and stocky. Like her sisters, too, she can be a bundle of fun and will be the first to start dancing at a family party. In many ways, she’s been the Aquinez family’s lifeline in the capital. One after another, her sisters have gone to live with her after they left school and sought work in Manila. One after another, Viola has found work for them before they married. As a result, Nana, Blessica, Viola, even Teté (although to a lesser degree), share memories of their working lives in Manila, as well as their childhood years in Bibiclat. In many ways, then, Viola has provided the glue that’s prevented the Aquinez extended family from falling apart. Even now, she’s looking after Tuto’s one and only daughter, Telay, who passed a scholar’s exam and has been permitted – like Nana three decades before her – to finish her schooling in Makati. The Bibiclat-Makati link is kept strong and active in other ways, too. Even though she moved away from Makati

People • 17

when she got married to Franklin, Blessica moved back when she first got pregnant and is still registered as living there (even though she’s moved back to Cavite). Nana is the same, for she hasn’t moved her residential registration back to Bibiclat from Makati, where she was living before going to Hong Kong. Another kind of link has been forged by Viola’s husband, Gusto, who is from southern Luzon and who isn’t particularly close to his own brother and his family. He’s moved his parents’ ashes to the Bibiclat cemetery where they lie side by side with Agapito and Arsenia. The plot where they’re buried is now known, therefore, as the AquinezSimbulan plot. Both Viola and Gusto, and probably their children after them, will be buried in Bibiclat, together with Nana, Tuto and Tuto’s younger brother and their families. Which leaves the eldest sister, Veronica, and the other brother, Darius or Dar. Veronica also lives in Visoria, but, as I said, was away visiting her daughter in Korea during the period in which the events described in this book took place, so she doesn’t feature here. While making an occasional appearance in Bibiclat, Dar, together with his wife and daughters, doesn’t feature that much either in what follows, because he was for the most part working in Manila as a security guard for a Chinese casino owner. Not only this, but his wife and children were living with her parents in Bibiclat, rather than in the Aquinez compound with Tuto, and so tended to move in a different social circle in their everyday lives. One or two of the sisters comment disapprovingly on how Dar’s children, Queenie and Corazon, often fail to greet other members of the family when they meet in the street. And they also don’t ask to be blessed in the way that other village children (and grown ups) normally do. One other sister who doesn’t feature at all is the charming Salomé. Extremely soft-spoken and shy, Salomé is sandwiched in age between Viola and Teté and lives in the northern part of Metro-Manila with her husband and four daughters – one of whom, Gloria, has Down syndrome and needs almost full-time care from her mother. Sometimes the two of them come to stay for a couple of weeks with Nana in Bibiclat, but during the winter I was there, they didn’t. And that – as the Danish comedian, Victor Borge, used to say with such verve – takes care of that.

3

The Barangay Bibiclat is a barangay (pronounced ba-ran-guy), the smallest administrative unit in the Philippines – a barrio, ward or district in urban areas but, in the country, more or less equivalent to a village. Located about 130 miles north east of Manila, it consists of the village proper, together with three or four outlying communities, located in 7,000 hectares of roads and fields. Altogether, there are around 1,500 households, in which more than 8,000 people live. Bibiclat is the largest of fifteen barangay making up the municipality of nearby Aliaga, the population of which is just over 71,000 inhabitants. Aliaga also boasts four poblacion making up its town centre. A poblacion generally describes the centre of a town where the market, church, school and local government offices are located. Bibiclat’s official name is San Juan Bautista, since the barangay’s patron saint is St John the Baptist. However, it’s popularly referred to as Bibiclat, supposedly because the fields surrounding the original settlement were infested by snakes, or biclat – an Ilocano word meaning ‘python’. So Bibiclat means snakes, and one or two farmers I’ve met assure me that there are plenty of snakes, including pythons, in the banana groves out in the fields. Occasionally, Nana finds one in her garden, especially when the irrigation channel running along one boundary of her land is flooded, and Tuto is brought in to get rid of it. There is, as is often the case with folklore and origins, a second theory about where the barangay’s name came from. Two or three people have told me that when the Japanese occupation forces took over the barangay back in 1942 and saw all the snakes in the fields, it was they who changed the original name of Biclat to Bibiclat. This seems unlikely unless they

The Barangay • 19

were conversant with how the plural is often formed by reduplication in Tagalog, so I’ll provide my own etymological interpretation of what might have happened. The Japanese for snake is hebi. So maybe, just maybe, Imperial Army soldiers stationed here back in the early 1940s called the barangay ‘Hebiclat’, and maybe, just maybe, this name was then adapted to Bibiclat by the locals. As I said, I think this extremely unlikely, but, like many theories, it has a nice ring to it – at least, until its central premise is rudely shattered by a more acceptable rationalisation! That being said, Bibiclat seems to have come into existence under Spanish rule in about 1836, before receiving official recognition as a poblacion called San Juan Bautista in 1899. During the nineteenth century it had its own private schools where both Ilocano and Tagalog were taught. Their first English classes are said to have been taught in 1904, although over the years they don’t seem to have had much effect on local villagers’ conversational abilities in that language. In 1966, the barangay opened its own secondary school – the first barangay secondary school in the province of Nueva Ecija – and four years later, in 1970, its elementary school became one of two central schools in the Aliaga municipality. It is at present completing an extension that will allow all students to complete their high school education (what the English often refer to as ‘Sixth Form college’, although that is rather a grand term for the school here).

Figure 3.1. Distant view of Bibiclat across rice fields. © Brian Moeran.

20 • Ethnography in the Raw

Every barangay is a self-governing body, headed by a ‘captain’ who is elected every three years and becomes a member of the local ‘town council’ during his (or her) term of office. He is aided in this by a number of ‘consulars’. Nana’s father, Agapito, was once nominated for the position of Bibiclat captain, but wasn’t elected. If he had been, he would have had the power to settle disputes and put local wrongs to rights – an integral part of barangay justice. This was something Agapito was good at, at an informal level, which was why a lot of people wanted him to run for office. Alas, he wasn’t really into the kind of votes-for-favours ‘give and take’ expected of a barangay captain – a serious weakness for anyone contemplating running for political office at any level in the Philippines, as I’ll later describe. As for the word barangay, one theory found in Wikipedia is that it comes from balangay (originally pronounced ba-la-ngay), an Austronesian word meaning ‘sailboat’, and referring to Malay settlers’ outrigger long boats when they first came to the Philippines way back in time. Apparently, each boat would typically carry a headman and his extended family on board. They then settled along coastal areas and formed barangay (or balangay) communities. These were already in existence when the Spanish came in the mid-1500s. Even today, you can find some small barangay which are virtually single extended family villages, in spite of marriage with outsiders. Bibiclat definitely isn’t one such single-family barangay, but certain family names like Dela Cruz, Ancheta, Veracruz, Fulgueras, Nicolas and Simón, as well as Aquinez, predominate. Bibiclat lies about one fifth of the way along a concrete road linking Aliaga to its neighbouring township of Talavera. It is a long, straggling barangay whose houses for the most part cluster along this road, although you can find outlying communities along two short dirt tracks running parallel to the Aliaga-Talavera road, out in the fields. At one point, about half a mile beyond where a somewhat dilapidated overhead arch welcomes you to Bibiclat, the road from Aliaga splits in two and runs east-west on parallel tracks about one hundred yards apart, all the way through the middle of the barangay. At its centre is a crossroads. The road running north from the village, which has been properly concreted, leads straight out into the fields before reaching a dead end by the river a mile and a half later. People say that, one day in the not too distant future, a bridge is going to be built over the river, thereby allowing Bibiclat to have direct access to Teté’s barangay of Visoria and the neighbouring township of Santo Domingo. But, when

The Barangay • 21

pressed, they’ve no idea when this might happen. Maybe next week; or, possibly, next year; or, more likely, some time after that. At present, this concrete road is used exclusively by farmers on their motor tricycles, motorbikes, bicycles and – occasionally – their carabao water buffalo, on their way to and from the fields where they grow rice, onions, tomatoes, runner beans, pumpkins and other seasonal crops. In the winter months of January and February, the road is also used by rice wholesalers, who, in the early morning, spread rice grain out on the concrete to dry in the warm sunshine for several hundred yards along one of the road’s two lanes. This is illegal, but who cares? Certainly not the local police, who only put in an appearance if someone is shot or run down (both of which happened during my stay here). Late in the afternoon, half a dozen masked men in balaclavas (or pullovers wound around their heads), to protect them from the sun, will rake up the grain, and scoop it into dozens (occasionally hundreds) of 55 kilogram sacks, which they then heave onto their heads – sometimes, when showing off their muscles, on extended arms – and load onto waiting trucks. This is the road that I like most to walk along when I take my evening strolls and, now that the farmers have got used to the sight of an ungainly, tall foreigner in their midst, they invariably greet me with a honk of their horns, accompanied by ‘Hey, man!’ or ‘Hey, Joe!’ and the occasional ‘Wassurneim?’ followed by plenty of high-pitched laughter.

Figure 3.2. Drying rice on the road. © Brian Moeran.

22 • Ethnography in the Raw

The road leading south from Bibiclat’s centre is also as straight as an arrow, though not quite so well paved since it’s in constant use by cars and trucks, as well as by assorted motor bikes and tricycles, and has suffered from wear and tear. Like the northern road, it has one main artery leading off to the barangay cemetery after half a mile or so. Along it you pass a couple of small groups of run-down houses which are also part of Bibiclat. About a mile out from where it starts, on the border between Bibiclat and the neighbouring barangay of Bucot, the southern road passes under a bridge which has recently been built for the TPLex motorway extension from Tarlac to Cabanatuan. This is still very much under construction, and the road on the far side of the bridge for the next mile, as far as Bucot, located along the main road between Aliaga and Cabanatuan, has been churned up by hundreds of heavy trucks carting sand and soil for the new highway and leaving the road’s surface in an uneven, dusty, pot-holed mess. This isn’t going to get any better in the near future. The motorway isn’t due to be completed before 2021, but local inhabitants are already talking about how much easier it’s going to be to go to Manila then. And Manila, after all, is where almost everyone in the village goes in search of work, and – who knows – possibly fame and fortune, at some point in their lives.

Figure 3.3. Nana’s house. © Brian Moeran.

The Barangay • 23

Nana’s house is in some ways a monstrosity – an oblong block of plastered dark grey concrete that is one of the higher buildings in Bibiclat. Designed by her architect niece Gianna, it’s more of a city than a country house, although, with its three separate bedrooms (one of them with an ensuite bathroom), it is much, much bigger. The windows are comparatively small, and almost all of them (except for one bedroom and one window on the first-floor landing) are facing away from the direction of the prevailing wind at this time of the year. To be fair, though, this isn’t entirely Gianna’s fault. When pouring the concrete foundations, the builders didn’t follow instructions and reversed the original layout of the house. Which goes to show that builders in the Philippines can be as careless of plans as those elsewhere in the world. Still, the design of Nana’s house could, I think, have done with larger windows (like those of the older houses in the barangay built on stilts) and a few open, covered, airy spaces. Compared with most other houses in the village, Nana’s house isn’t just sturdy; it’s more or less complete. When I arrived, it lacked cosmetic finish in the form of paint on both interior and exterior walls, and the fixing of some external tiles on part of the front elevation, but that’s something we’ve been attending to during my stay here. There are probably three or four dozen houses in the village – mainly Figure 3.4. Bahay kubo, ‘cube house’. © Brian Moeran.

24 • Ethnography in the Raw

of one storey, but also larger – that have been painted and finished properly. Most, though not all, of them have been built by locals who have worked abroad, the rest by a few individuals who run successful businesses of one kind or another. Overall, Bibiclat strikes me as quite poor. I’ve seen a much higher standard of buildings in other barangay I’ve passed through, although not in the Aliaga-Talavera-Cabanatuan region. A number of homes in Bibiclat are like Nana’s in terms of their being concreted, but without a decorated finish. More often, they consist of roughly put together breezeblocks, supporting a roof of corrugated metal sheets. Equally often, they have window frames, but no windows as such. Sometimes bamboo lattice work is used to fill a window; at other times, nothing at all. Yet other houses are little more than hovels – wood and bamboo constructions that look as if they’ll fly away in the next typhoon. Here, though, my European prejudices have surfaced. What I’ve referred to as ‘hovels’ are in fact traditional Filipino houses, known as bahay kubo (literally, ‘cube houses’), made of bamboo, with nipa thatched roofs, and raised off the ground to prevent animals from easily coming into them. These homes usually have no partitions and so allow whole families to eat, sleep and live together as one. The area below the house can be used for storage (although the occasional flood hardly helps). Their roofs are sloping and windows usually comparatively large to better cope with the tropical heat. Like similar dwellings one comes across in Laos, Cambodia and other parts of South East Asia, the bahay kubo is ‘environmentally friendly’ in terms both of its layout and of the materials with which it is constructed. Its un-partitioned layout also acts a symbol of togetherness. Another kind of traditional house is the bahay na bato stone house. There are still several of them in Bibiclat, although most have been in part renovated. It’s said that the bahay na bato became popular during the Spanish colonial period (1565–1898). It is a two-storey house made of stone and wood, with living quarters usually on the upper floor, consisting of an open living-eating area, surrounded by bedrooms. Nowadays, the space below the upper storey tends to be walled in to create a larger living space. Like the bahay kubo, the stone house has large windows, but with wooden frames and capiz shell window panes, which half-reveal and half-conceal the interior from without, and the exterior from within. This difference in materials shows that these stone houses were a symbol of affluence and status difference during the colonial period. When I visited Vigan, just over three hundred kilometres north of Bibiclat, I came across several blocks of bahay na bato town houses in the city centre. Those that had been

The Barangay • 25

restored (mainly transformed into hotels) were extremely handsome, with polished wood interiors, thick planks and decorative tiles. A touch of the Mediterranean in South East Asia. There is one final feature of the layout of Bibiclat, as well as of other barangay, that’s worth noting here. In very large part houses do not have their own plots of land. Rather, you’ll often find two or three, occasionally more, houses (some of them mere dwellings) cramped together on a single plot of land and forming a compound. This comes about through the division of land by inheritance and enables parts of an extended family to live together and share food and child rearing duties. Tuto shares a small plot of land with his younger brother Darius. On it are two dwellings – one the house in which his parents lived before they died and into which Tuto, as older brother, moved. This was made possible when Nana who, as youngest child, had inherited the family property after the death of her parents, gave it to her brother when she was living in Hong Kong and had no immediate use for it. The other dwelling, now renovated, is smaller and inhabited by Darius’ family. Similarly, although Nana’s is the only house on a plot of land owned by her older sister, Viola, the latter intends to build her own house behind it in a few years’ time when her husband, Gusto, retires. So Nana and I will also be living in a family compound. In neither case is anyone in possession of proper deeds for the land they live on.

Figure 3.5. Malou and Kambal’s house, with sari sari kiosk in front. © Brian Moeran.

26 • Ethnography in the Raw

Quite often, you’ll find a small sari sari general merchandise or candy store (more like a kiosk) in the front of a compound facing the road. Villagers come and buy sweets, crackers, pasta sauce, soft drinks, beer, rum, even fresh vegetables from the family’s fields there, although what precisely is stocked depends on the size of the store and the financial wherewithal of its owner. Larger stores stocking a greater variety of goods probably have a turnover of at least 1,000 pesos (£16.50) a day. Smaller sari sari kiosks often provide enough ‘pocket money’ to cover everyday expenses. Nana is thinking about setting up her own store in front of the house and has invited her older sister, Teté, to run it. For various reasons that will become clearer later on, Teté hasn’t committed herself to such a venture. For the time being, Nana and I won’t be living as an extended family… at least, not yet.

4

Buying a Car Given that Bibiclat isn’t served by public transport of any kind (not even by a fabled jeepney, of the kind left behind by the US military after the end of the Pacific War), the only way to get anywhere from this back-of-beyond neighbourhood is by local ‘taxi’. This is a threewheel affair, consisting of a Japanese-built motorcycle with a small, low sidecar attached. Since in my prime I was six foot four and a half inches tall, and even now after three quarters of a century am only an inch or two less, I find it virtually impossible to fit into this mode of transportation. Or, to be more precise, I might be able to flop down inside the sidecar eventually, provided I found a way of tucking my long legs in off the surface of the road, but I’d never be able to get out again. So, the only sensible way to overcome our transportation problem is by buying a car. Nana admits she never considered any of this when she first thought about building a house in her natal village, close to family and friends. But, now that I’ve ridden in to the rescue, like a knight on a white charger saddled with money (or more money than she, or probably any of the locals, could ever earn), she’s been insisting that we buy a brand new car. I’ve balked at this. After all, she can’t (yet) drive. Why not buy something second-hand? No, a second-hand car is unacceptable. It might break down. Also, you can’t trust the person selling it to you. I suspect, here, an understandable issue of pride. After spending more than a decade working away from home in Hong Kong, Nana needs to show family, neighbours and friends the rewards of her hard won gains (under which category I guess I myself am now placed).

28 • Ethnography in the Raw

During the summer months, when she was finishing off her employment contract and I was back home in England, we had intermittent spates of car discussion on WhatsApp. When was I going to buy a car? What kind of car would I buy? I kept backing away from spending what struck me as a small fortune on a new car. I pointed out that I had a perfectly serviceable 2003 Toyota Corolla which had cost me £1,400 and which I was driving happily around central and south Devon. In addition, apart from the fact that Nana herself has yet to learn to drive, I knew from previous experience in the Philippines that I didn’t really trust my own driving skills on roads that seem totally chaotic, both in their maintenance and use (although usage has since shown that there is, in fact, a certain method in the apparent madness of Filipino driving). Still, like another rather small woman – a former British prime minister on the other side of the world – Nana wasn’t for turning. She was, as I’ve mentioned, born in the Year of the Wild Boar, according to the Japanese twelve-year zodiac cycle. Unperturbed by my longdistance objections, therefore, she pushed forward with her plans. There followed several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing about a particular car, a Toyota Innova, which, she assured me, was perfect for our needs. A friend of a friend had won one in the national lottery and was selling it cheap because he already owned a new car. I could get a bargain. By the time I’d asked a few relevant questions, the car had been sold. Back to square one – except that another friend of a relative also won the (same or a different) lottery and had a car to sell cheaply. Again, I dithered. Again, we missed a ‘golden opportunity’. I thought of buying a lottery ticket myself. The week following my arrival in the Philippines in early December was marked by Nana’s tenacious persistence that we buy a Toyota Innova. She’d already talked to a dealer in Manila, where she’d gone to meet me off the plane from Bristol, and had been promised financing. But why get a loan and pay interest, when we had just enough cash to buy an Innova outright? As the week progressed, we ended up in head-to-head clashes, and, in my jetlagged state, I began to think that our somewhat uncertain marriage might quickly be coming to an end. Once we got to Bibiclat, I was made acutely aware of our transportation problem, and so I acquiesced. OK, then. We buy a Toyota Innova. Nana’s expression at my capitulation was a curious mixture of triumph and affection. But, I insisted, we really shouldn’t buy a car ‘unseen’, as she seemed ready to do. We needed to see one ‘in the flesh’, try it out, and make sure it was really the kind of car we (she) needed. A few days later, therefore, she persuaded an old school

Buying a Car • 29

friend’s husband, Kambal (the nickname of anyone born a twin in the Philippines), to take us to a Toyota sales outlet in the nearby city of Cabanatuan. Once there Kambal parked his van, and we got out and walked up the steps to an imposing entrance. A fully-armed security guard with pump shotgun opened the door for us and bid us a respectful ‘good morning, sir’ twice, and a ‘good morning, madam’. We entered the building with a sense of expectation (Nana), trepidation (me), and studied indifference (Kambal). There, right in front of us, was the perfect car (an Innova) in the perfect colour (white). Nana clapped her hands with delight. She motioned to me to get into the driver’s seat. This was, indeed, my moment of reckoning. Imagine my relief, therefore, when I got into the Innova and discovered that I couldn’t actually fit my legs in under the steering wheel. ‘What? Impossible!’ ‘No. Look!’ She looked and her jaw dropped open with astonishment. But this was an Innova. A very large car. Put the seat back. I had already done so. But how could I not fit? Nana looked around in panic. How about the Fortuner, which stood next to the Innova? It was larger (and, something she didn’t mention, considerably more expensive). My legs had to fit into that. But they didn’t, and I breathed again. There were other cars in the dealer’s salesroom, of course, so I tried them. I could just fit into a nice little run-around without a mass of computer equipment cutting down on legroom, called a Vios. Just the sort of practical car Nana needed. But it merited little more than a glance and a derisive sniff, before we moved to a larger Avanza. The sniff at this was less derisive, but wasn’t completed because, suddenly, she was moving quickly away towards a bright red car nearby. ‘A Rush’, she exclaimed happily. The latest car. The perfect car. A beaming smile. But could I fit in to drive it? It turned out that I could. But it had only five seats. A quick conversation in Tagalog with the sales woman who knew Kambal revealed that there was also a seven-seater version. Perfect. I wasn’t sure why, but perfect all the same. And the price was right, too. A full £5,000 cheaper than the Innova. I finally relented. ‘OK, then. Buy it’. Unashamed delight. However, after considerable discussion over a cup of watered-down, very sweet coffee, and after much coming and going by Kambal’s lady friend, it transpired that the dealer didn’t actually have a Rush (or an Avanza, or, for that matter, an Innova) in

30 • Ethnography in the Raw

stock. How long before they did? Maybe two weeks. Maybe a month. Maybe two. It all depended. It was, after all, the holiday season. Nothing was predictable. Plan B, then. Ignoring the Nissan outlet opposite, Kambal drove us off to a Mitsubishi sales place nearby where he had another ‘friend’ working there. We parked, were bid a polite good morning by another security guard, with another pump action shotgun slung over one shoulder, and entered. It transpired that the friend was off that day. Never mind. Over the phone, that friend introduced us to a colleague who then became Kambal’s, and maybe also our, friend. He’d look after us. There were just two cars on display in the Mitsubishi showroom – both of them on the large side. The smaller one, called an Xpander, accommodated my long legs when I got into the driving seat. It had the, apparently necessary, seven seats. It was white. It was on sale at a full £4,000 cheaper than the dreaded Innova (which, admittedly, cost only £20,000 – not bad for a seven-seater SUV). And, miracle of miracles, it was in stock. As a result, I saved myself twenty per cent on the purchase of a new car. For someone who, when ageing inflicts a series of hip and back pains, has in recent years been obliged to pay exorbitant sums of money to travel business class on inter-continental flights, this was an unexpected boon. For the first time in my life, my long legs had saved me money – rather than obliging me to spend more. Not only this, but Nana’s happy, too! She has quickly transferred her affectionate caresses from me to our new acquisition, adding that the Xpander was the car she’d originally suggested (although I have no recollection of this). We got the car the following day and have finally become mobile, although driving here in the Philippines has been quite an experience. Rules, if there are any in the first place, seem not to apply. Frequent use of the horn is expected and required. Use of lights at night isn’t common among smaller vehicles on the road. Street lamps, pavements, traffic lights, road signs are rare, often non-existent. Pedestrians feel they have as much right as drivers to use the road as they please. They are further imperilled by the fact that overtaking is often done on the inside lane (motor tricycles, in particular, hog the middle lane). I look forward to my first accident! But why did Nana insist on buying a seven-seater SUV? There is a marketing coda to this entry – other than admiration at the ability of Mitsubishi to come up with the name Xpander for a seven-seater designed as a first purchase in a Catholic market, where you’re never far from a place called Concepción. In this context one

Buying a Car • 31

might suggest that every time an unwanted child is conceived, it might be classified as a ‘miss-bishi’! Joking aside, you won’t find an Innova, or Fortuner, or Xpander in the UK or Japan. Even my American friends have commented on the Xpander’s size. The fact is, though, there are comparatively few small and medium-sized cars on the road in the Philippines. By my count, eight out of ten vehicles are motor tricycles, and seven to eight out of ten cars on the road are SUVs. I’ve finally figured out why. Japanese car manufacturers have cleverly worked out that not that many Filipinos can afford to buy new cars, and that those who do like to drive their extended families around in them. So the models have seven, even nine, seats apiece (four Filipinos fit into an average sized boot!). This, of course, cuts down on overall leg space, which is OK if you are, like many Filipinos, little more than five-foot tall, but not if you’re an unwieldy giant. This realisation supports my original suspicion that Nana wanted the car for her family as a whole, and not just the two of us (she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, see the point in buying a small run-around). This point was driven home to me when three days after completing our purchase, on Christmas Day, fifteen of us piled into two large SUVs and drove to the sea for a picnic. Since then, whenever I suggest that the two of us go somewhere for a drive, I find that the ‘rice telegraph’ brings about the sudden and unexpected arrival of a

Figure 4.1. Family outing made possible by the Mitsubishi Xpander. © Brian Moeran.

32 • Ethnography in the Raw

handful of relatives who happily pile into the Xpander for the ride. I guess, as one gets older, one’s motto should be to never stop learning. There’s another side to our Xpander, though, that I didn’t pick up on until later. Nana’s own horizons have expanded through ownership and use of a car. Every now and then we’ve taken trips – to Subic Bay, to Pantabangan Dam and to Minalungao National Park, all two to three hours’ drive away, as well as further afield, to Baler, Vigan and Baguio. Nana has never been to any of these places before (apart from Baguio twenty years ago when she went there on a company outing), because of the lack of transportation facilities, and she’s been really happy and excited to see different parts of her own country. Buying an Xpander, therefore, has been an eye-opener in many unanticipated ways.

5

Kinship Terms and Names We all of us have names of one sort or another: personal or Christian names, surnames, nicknames and kinship names. In Japan, the dead are given posthumous names, which are different from those they bore in life. At the other end of life’s continuum, when my former wife was pregnant and we didn’t know what sex the baby was going to be, we used to call it Oxy (after oxymoron – a pun on my surname). Only a couple of days after she was born were we able to choose Christian names that we felt to be right for the little person who had joined our lives: Ursula Teodora. Names always signify membership of a social class or gender. They classify their bearers in one way or another, as they do those who bestow names that almost always belong to a particular milieu, period or style. As Clara, Nana is a member of a class of women called Clara. As Clara Ocampo Aquinez, she is a member of the family class called Aquinez on her father’s side, and of Ocampo on her mother’s. Her nickname, as we’ve seen, is Nana, and her kinship name is paté, used of the youngest girl in a family. Each of these names has a conscious or cultural connotation which affects the image others have of its bearer. Together they often have a subtle influence in shaping someone’s personality in a positive or negative way. How does it feel to be a boy called Joy, or a girl called Sunshine? Was Blessica in some small way destined by her Christian name to become a Born Again Christian? Here in the Philippines, all kinds of Spanish sounding names – from Darius to Diego for boys, and Devina to Dominadores for girls – are accepted as the norm, although Tagalog names like Bayani (meaning ‘hero’) or Dalisay (‘pure’) can be given to children. English names,

34 • Ethnography in the Raw

too, abound, as parents call their children Jester, Arnold, Grace or Princess. What intrigues me, though, is the kinship terms (or role terms) and nicknames that often accompany the use of names here – both when addressing people and referring to them. Nana, as I’ve mentioned, has seven siblings. The eldest, Veronica, is called ateng, because she is the oldest of them all. She is followed by Viola who is ditché to all except Veronica who calls her by her first name. The third sister, Salomé, is called sansei, by her younger siblings. Then comes Teté, who, as the fourth daughter/sister, is known as kaká, while her immediately younger fifth sister, Blessica, is até. Finally, at the sixth attempt, came a boy – Resti, or Tuto, the elder of two brothers – who, like all older male siblings, is called kuye by his younger brother Dar, and by Nana. Dar himself, the seventh child, is called dikon by Nana who, as the youngest of the siblings, is addressed and referred to by everyone as paté. In other words, older siblings use names when addressing or referring to younger siblings (except the very youngest), while younger siblings – in theory, at least – address and refer to their elder siblings by these role terms. So here we have a complex version of sibling differentiation, unlike anything we find in northern Europe or, indeed, in Japan (a society and culture I know quite well and with which I will sometimes compare my experiences here in the Philippines). Japanese also differentiate between siblings, but they create complexity at a different level: between reference and address. So, while family relations are also structured from the position of the youngest child (as is the case with Nana), Japanese do not distinguish between the different older brothers or sisters, who are all addressed or referred to as onīsan/ani or onēsan/ane respectively by their younger siblings and, as in Bibiclat, by their first names by older ones. Only the youngest is called by everyone by his or her given name. So, if she were Japanese, Nana would be called Clara by her brothers and sisters, who might then refer to her occasionally as suekko (equivalent to paté). In English and other European languages, we have simplified life and make do with adding the words ‘older’ or ‘younger’ when referring to our siblings, if we feel it necessary in the context. But we very rarely address any of them as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, except when speaking to them ironically. So far, so good? In fact, the rules outlined above are not strictly followed. Teté, for example, dislikes the respect form kaká (which, after all, has lavatorial implications in Spanish [and Greek]) and insists on being called até instead. It transpires that Salomé has a ‘pet’ name, Lolo, which is what Teté and Blessica always call her. Only

Kinship Terms and Names • 35

Tuto, Dar and Nana call her sansei. Nana never calls her brother Dar dikon because there is only one year’s difference between them, and they regarded each other as ‘best friends’ during their childhood. Predictably perhaps, systems never function in the way that they are supposed to. As Nana put it, ‘the trouble with our family is that there are too many of us for the system to work properly!’ Role terms take over when it comes to marriage (affinal) relations. Like Japanese couples, Blessica used the self-referential ‘Ma’ when talking to her husband, who referred to himself as ‘Pa’ when he was alive. In a similar manner, Teté was nanan (mother) and her husband, Felix, tatai (father) before he was murdered. Otherwise, in-laws use first names (Blessica and Teté) when addressing one another. In addition to these kinship names, almost everyone here has a nickname, just to confuse the inquisitive foreigner. Apart from being called Resti by many of his friends, for example, kuya Tuto was christened Restituto Buenaventura. So he has in fact three names for people to choose from, although I’ve never heard anyone call him Buenaventura. His wife Avelina likes to be known as Ogis, while Teté’s daughter, Gertude, is known to one and all as Yoyo. The husband of Marilou, or Malou, one of Nana’s school friends, is christened Rodel, but – as I noted in the previous section – is generally referred to locally as Kambál (‘twin’) because he is one of virtually identical twins (the differentiating point is a small birthmark to the side of his left eyebrow). So, as elsewhere in the world, names can be attached to physical peculiarities, like being overweight, tall, lame, deaf, and so on – like el Gordo for a fat man in Spanish; or ‘Shorty’ in English, and ‘Lofty’ for someone who is very tall. In the Philippines the latter might be referred to as Goliat, or kapré, which Nana describes as ‘a scary person who lives in a tall tree’ – in other words, a tree demon. Apparently, the word kapré comes from the Arabic ‘kafir’, meaning a non-believer in Islam. In other words, tall people are by definition, somehow, outsiders. But names can also reflect some other kind of difference – like place – so that an old woman who was born in the southern province of Visayas is called ‘Visaya’. When I frequented for some years the island of Aigina in Greece, one friend coined the name o Ιαπονέζος (Iaponézos) for me because I’d spent so much time in Japan. Mannerisms, too, play their part. In Bibiclat, we call Joel, our builder, ‘(Mr) Actually’, because last Christmas he visited Nana’s house, got drunk, and preceded every phrase in English with the word ‘actually’, much to the amusement of all present.

36 • Ethnography in the Raw

What the giving of names tells us, I think, is the degree of community felt and valued by a group of people – whether in a Philippine village, seaside suburb of Valencia, or on an Aegean island. So, while marking out differences of one sort or another, names also bring people together, whether they like it or not. An impoverished use of names signals an impoverished social cohesion. My own personal reference to all this harks back to my days at boarding school in England where, in each successive school, I received three different names. The first. Moorhen, was based on a phonetic similarity to my surname, given me by a headmaster whose main interest in life, it seemed, was birds – an interest that got me off two classes one afternoon when, during a ramble earlier that same day, I had spotted a very large nest some way out on Farnham Common where the school was located, but which, when returned to in the company of Mr Lynn Jones, turned out to be nothing more than a mass of large twigs gathered in the crook of a fir tree’s branches. The origin of my second nickname, Mole, I forget, but it probably derived from a reading of The Wind in the Willows. Whatever, it stuck with me for five years and created a kind of schizophrenic existence in which, at boarding school, I was a short-sighted, underground, tunnelling animal for eight months of the year, and a very proper young Brian, with sharp eyesight, slick hair and parting, for the remaining four months of holidays at home. The third, Hawk, focused on my physical appearance (my nose had been well and truly broken in a piggy-back fight one summer evening when, as Mole, I was eleven years old). At school, boys and teachers alike almost all had nicknames of one sort or another – Slug Seymour, Lolly Lawrence, Hooky Dunlop, or Madame Don-do-dēz Hussey. At my public school, we were even obliged to take a new boys’ initiation test, which obliged us to spend the first three weeks learning, among other things, the nicknames of masters. These were sometimes connected to their mannerisms – ‘Gush’ Milligan, or ‘Om’ Waye (whose children, when born, were called ‘omelettes’). At other times, they were based on their initials – L.P.E. ‘Loopy’ Taylor; or P.D.L. ‘Piddle’ Waye (he had two nicknames). We also had to learn a whole vocabulary of names, acronyms and rules about who was who, and what was what, as well as what was, and was not, permitted by whom, when and where. Prefects were ‘pups’, and houses were ‘socials’ (a misnomer if ever there was one, given the anti-social nature of teenage boys). Those who opted for hockey and cricket were ‘dry bobs’; those who rowed ‘wet bobs’. We urinated in the ‘pumps’, and defecated in the ‘rears’, and the man

Kinship Terms and Names • 37

designated the job of cleaning out the lavatories was called the ‘Rear Admiral’ (a year or two later promoted to ‘Master of the Rolls’). Whether we liked it or not, names bound us together – and anyone reading this who went to the same (or similar) school may inevitably feel a sense of experiential wistful camaraderie nurtured, I’m sure, by a shared existential misery. But, by naming people, places and activities in special ways at school, we also achieved a sense of being able to act on a world that was otherwise outside our control. Names, then, have a mystical power. In some societies it is forbidden to speak the name of someone after he or she dies. Names often invoke a relationship – between the here and there (Simon, Sanjay or Satoru), and between the now and then (I am named after my father’s younger brother who was a test pilot and died in a plane crash before I was born). In these ways, names define a potentiality, which may or may not be taken up. Philippine first names seem not to conform to either of these tendencies very much. Theresa wasn’t named after an aunt, or Buenaventura after his great grandfather, for instance. If they were, their names would allow the dead to be re-embodied in the living and so provide proof of the continuity of kinship over time. But, as I’ll show in the next entry, the Philippine family in Bibiclat doesn’t have any great depth, although there are plenty of rich and powerful families – Aboitiz, Aquino, Araneta, Ayala, and so on to Zobel – that do. This may explain why names do not recur in family lines here, in the way that they do, for instance, in Japan where continuity in the male line has been very important. Thus, in successive generations, we can find a man called Yoshinobu, whose father is Hideyoshi. He may then name his son Nobuhide, who then names his son Yoshihide. Imagine trying to do that with English or Spanish names. Roger – Gerald – Aldrich – Richard doesn’t quite have the same ring to it! You will have spotted that Filipinos, like the Spanish (or, for that matter, Danes), bear both father’s and mother’s surnames, although nowadays, unlike in Spanish, they place the mother’s family name before, not after, the father’s. Nevertheless, all children’s names celebrate the union of a man and woman – a union which changes the twin surnames of related individuals every generation. Agapito Aquinez married Arsenia Ocampo, so their children bear these two family names – Ocampo Aquinez – but their grandchildren do not. For example, Teté married into the Rosario family, so her daughter Yoyo was christened Gertrude Aquinez Rosario. Her daughter is Sunshine Rosario Maravilla (Maravilla being the family name of Sunshine’s father, Nicholas). Only the paternal family name survives through

38 • Ethnography in the Raw

more than two generations, provided that boys continue to be born. Although women do not have to adopt their husbands’ family name, the maternal name is usually lost in the second generation regardless of the gender of children born. What, then, is in a name? A lot – as any brand manager will tell you. It was the first thing God did when he (or she) created the world. So naming is a rudimentary expression of our need to act on the world around us, as well as in it (as I suggested when describing the special language developed at my public school). By conforming in large part to Spanish nomenclature, although with delightful extensions (Violania and Blessica), and by continuing to name things around them with Spanish words in Tagalog (bumbero for fire fighter [bombero], lapis for pencil [lápiz], or hulyo for July [julio]), Filipinos allow their Hispanic heritage to live on in the modern world.

6

Tying the Knot Nana informs me, somewhat suddenly, that we are to attend a wedding this coming Sunday. The son of her first cousin on her father’s side, Raymark, is getting married in the next barangay of San Carlos, in what the invitation refers to as a ‘Christ Enthroned Church’. The marriage certificate (which I later find on a table beside me in the church itself and am able to peruse at length) calls it the CROSSWorld Mission, whose ‘mission’ statement reads: ‘Reproducing Changed Lives and Making Disciples’. ‘The wedding couple say they’re “Christian”, not Catholic’, Nana says. ‘I don’t know why. My cousin Cirila used to be Catholic’. Here I encounter what is, to me, an unexpected distinction between Catholicism and other forms of Christianity. I am to come across this separation of Christians from Catholics again and again during the next few months. It’s usually made by non-Catholics. Nana tells me that all Filipino weddings, wherever they’re held, have first and second ‘sponsors’. First Sponsors include godparents from both bride and groom’s sides. These can number as many as eighteen. Then there are the Second Sponsors – the Best Man and bridesmaids, together with various others who assist during the ceremony. What she fails to add is that all weddings are witnessed by not two, but a veritable multitude of relatives and friends, of whom this time she happens to be one among nineteen others. On the Sunday morning, dressed in our finery, we set out in the car for San Carlos, picking up Tuto on the way. We arrive a good twenty minutes ahead of schedule and so can park our car in the shade of a mango tree in the forecourt of the church. This is a two-storey

40 • Ethnography in the Raw

building of breeze blocks and windows downstairs without glass, covered by a corrugated metal roof. The entrance is bedecked with white plastic flowers, which once upon a time would have been white orchids, and inside a dozen rows of cheap plastic chairs have been set up either side of the aisle. A pop version of Pachabel’s Air is being played loudly, before that good old Elvis Presley song, Falling in Love with You, which starts ominously ‘Fools rush in…’. People begin to arrive and stand around the forecourt a little uncertainly. A ten-year-old boy is told to be ‘blessed’ by the foreigner and nervously comes forward to take my hand. Having discovered that I do not in fact bite, he stands beside me and watches as I sit and take note of what’s going on. A dog decides to mingle with the guests. Newcomers greet those whom they know, forming separate groups depending on whether they’re acquainted with the bride or with the groom. The latter himself arrives in an open Suzuki van with several bridesmaids in full-length sky-blue dresses. For his part Raymark is wearing a white tuxedo, black and white striped string tie, and a pair of

Figure 6.1. The happy couple with their sponsors. © Brian Moeran.

Tying the Knot • 41

off-white trousers with black shoes. Two of the younger bridesmaids are pushed forward to be blessed. They stare at me expressionless until I cross my eyes and elicit a shy giggle in response. More sponsors appear. The girls and young women are all dressed in the same sky-blue dresses (this being the wedding’s chosen colour theme), which the grown-ups around make sure are properly fitted and tied at the back in neat bows. The young men wear similar coloured shirts with black bow ties under black waistcoats, black trousers and shoes. Even the pastor wears the same blue coloured shirt with dog collar under a charcoal grey suit. Older women wear shiny white satin-like dresses, most of them with low heels, while the men have put on loose-fitting, see-through native Filipino baróng shirts, made of embroidered pineapple cloth. These they wear over ordinary white shirts, or T-shirts, and black trousers, half revealing, half concealing their bodies. One or two of them carry fans which they flap idly in the heavy air. These are the godparents. The service is due to start at 10.30 am, but by 10.45 there’s no sign of the bride. Still, as I’ve quickly learned, nothing ever starts on time here. For Filipinos time is a flexible concept. Is this something they learned from the Spanish, for whom time used to be equally flexible? An MC starts to organise all the Second Sponsors, calling out their names and getting them to line up in pairs – men on the left, women on the right (the opposite to the positions taken by the bride and groom when the ceremony actually starts). Behind them the godparents also form pairs. Slowly, they move forward into the church. Each couple stops on the threshold and waits to have their names announced before moving up the aisle to take their seats in front of the altar (a moveable table brought forward to the front of the dais for the occasion, to allow room for the hi-fi equipment and speakers behind). Once they’ve all been announced the remaining odds and sods who haven’t already entered do so. But where’s the bride? The door of a battered grey saloon car opens and out she’s bundled, one young woman in dark blue pulling her, while a rather large lady in a yellow Hawaiian-style shirt pushes from behind. Once the bride is safely upright, her dress’s ten-foot train and veil are carefully draped and trained by the lady in yellow, with a large fan between her teeth. The bride has been here all along. Now, with splendid bouquet of blue and white flowers, she stands in all her glory by the door of the church – doors which have in the meantime been slid shut, apparently to prevent her from entering. This is all part of the ceremony, it seems. A bridesmaid sponsor left outside shows the bride how to open the doors, but in so doing steps

42 • Ethnography in the Raw

into the church and surprises all those inside into thinking that she is herself the bride. What starts out as applause is replaced by laughter as the bridesmaid quickly comes back out of the church, her cheeks a blushing pink. The doors are closed and locked again and this time April Rose Cantor Vercida knocks on them and is admitted, to join her future husband, Raymark Aquinez Cando, at the altar, as one of the Second Sponsors, a teenage boy, sings ‘You are so beautiful’. Now for the real thing. Except it isn’t really. It transpires that the couple has already been married – in a civil wedding, officiated by the Mayor more than a fortnight earlier in his Aliaga Town Hall office. This, then, is the Christian consummation of that ceremony, as the pastor informs all those present, before embarking on a long sermon during which he addresses the bride and groom both separately and as a couple. There’s plenty of chatter going on at the back of the church where I’m sitting, and several people are fanning themselves vigorously with whatever comes easily to hand – an exercise book, handbag, or towel handkerchief. A woman beside me combs her long hair for several minutes, while a baby cries vigorously until pacified with a bottle of milk. The pastor, who goes by the name of Rogelio D. Pallardo, talks and talks, interspersing his Tagalog with words like ‘mutually’, ‘heart’, ‘marriage’, ‘responsible’ and the occasional long English phrase: ‘Stop trying to protect yourself’. The baby finishes its milk and starts to cry again. The couple is told to stand and face each other, before repeating the pastor’s words, one by one, into a microphone thrust into their faces by one of the sponsors. After this, two candles are lit, one each side of the bride and groom, and the couple kneels as the pastor, accompanied once more by Pachabel, blesses the bride and groom. Two sponsors place a white braided cord over the couple’s shoulders (uniting them as one, though without a knot being tied) as they pray together with one voice into a screeching microphone. The pastor gives Raymark a white muslin bag of something which is to be a ‘symbol’ of something else. Nana tells me later that inside was a heart containing several coins (aras) to symbolise the groom’s duty to provide for his wife and future family. All the witnesses are then called up to stand and affirm the marriage. One by one, they sign the marriage certificate proffered them by another of the Second Sponsors. Pachabel has given way to Elvis Presley and fools rushing in, as bride and groom down a small glass of red wine each, together with the pastor. The glass coffee pot from which it had been poured is then conveniently brought back to the table where I’m sitting. A young woman there pours out a

Tying the Knot • 43

glass of wine, raises it to me, says ‘Cheers!’ with a big smile, before, disappointingly, handing it to a young man sitting nearby. Alas! She doesn’t offer me any, maybe because she thinks it’s a bit early in the day for a foreigner to get inebriated. By now an hour has gone by and I sense that the ceremony is coming to an end. The congregation is asked to stand as the priest talks for another while, before instructing the couple to turn and face us all. Cameras and mobile phones are out now. It’s time for the much anticipated marital kiss. The pastor wipes the sweat from his head with a small towel and tells Raymark he may kiss his bride. This he does by way of a brief peck on her left cheek. The pastor isn’t satisfied. ‘Do it again’, He commands. ‘To a count of five. Starting now’. Raymark and April Rose set to with a hearty mouth to mouth kiss that lasts until the pastor finally reaches the magic number. This is followed by long applause, and a splendidly out-of-tune trio singing a long song, while the MC arranges the witnesses in line each side of the newly married couple for a formal wedding photograph. The rest of us are allowed to head out into fresher air outside the church. We’re not quite done, though. There’s a reception down the road. By the time we’ve found a parking space and arrived, most people

Figure 6.2. ‘You may kiss the bride’. © Brian Moeran.

44 • Ethnography in the Raw

are tucking into their rice and adobo dishes. Some are even leaving. This is no wedding reception with speeches and alcohol to liven up the occasion; no newly-weds being driven away to their honeymoon in a limousine trailing noisy tin cans. Raymark and April Rose can’t afford a honeymoon. Once the reception is over, she’ll go and live in her husband’s family home.

Figure 6.3. Tying the knot with 1,000 peso notes. © Brian Moeran.

Tying the Knot • 45

This causes pause for reflection. Remember how the bride had to knock on a locked door to gain admittance to her own wedding? For the woman, a wedding is a solitary affair. It legally separates her from her childhood loved ones. Her godparents, parents and relatives have gone into the church before her, leaving her physically and symbolically alone outside. In order not to remain alone in life, she has to ask permission to join both church, which officiates and sanctifies her marriage, and a new family. Once the ceremony is over, she goes with her husband to live in his home with his parents. She’s symbolically cut off from her past and reintegrated into society by means of a new family. Meanwhile, at the reception, the bride and groom have to do a kind of swaying, soft-shoe shuffle to loud music, while godparents, relatives and friends from both sides pin 1,000 and 500 peso notes to the bride’s veil and groom’s tuxedo. This goes on for quite a while, with bundles of notes being unclipped from time to time, placed in a cardboard box nearby and counted by Nana’s cousin, the groom’s mother. I don’t know how much she gathered, but it must have been well over 30,000 pesos (£500) by the time Nana stood up and, with her customary abruptness, said: ‘Let’s go!’

7

Family Families are the stuff of which the discipline of anthropology used to be made. Families, of whatever kind, are important because they define how mates are selected; who marries whom; who lives together with whom; who is head of the family; which relatives are thought of as most important; and, crucially, how children are reared and by whom. Throughout history, the extended family – those kinship relations linking successive generations through descent on either the father’s or mother’s side – has been the most common household arrangement. Nana’s family structure can best be described as a ‘modified’ extended family. This means that it doesn’t consist of a combination of nuclear families, where a man has more than one wife. Nor is it usually a joint family, in which the parental couple live in the same household with their unmarried children and married sons, together with their wives and children. Nor, either, is it what’s called a ‘stem’ family, with one married child, together with spouse and children, residing in the parental household together with his or her parents and unmarried siblings. Rather, children usually marry out or migrate from the parental household once they get married, but gather for common activities on a regular basis (like Christmas and the New Year, but also, in the past, for rice transplanting and other farming tasks). This sibling group forms the basis of the Luzon family. The head of Nana’s family was, until he died in 2011, Agapito (‘the loved one’), who presided over his eight children and their spouses and children. When he died, the family split into several heads – one for each married couple, as was the case when Agapito’s father before

Family • 47

him had died and the four brothers each started their own families. Although it is formally the male who becomes head of a family, those concerned usually refer to each group by the name of both husband and wife. Nevertheless, there is no continuity through primogeniture of the kind you find in – say – royal or aristocratic houses, where the head of a family may well be younger than other male relatives (including uncles and cousins). Who inherits what by way of family property is important in all families. In Bibiclat, primogeniture – whereby the eldest son or child inherits everything – isn’t the norm. Rather, what’s called ‘ultimogeniture’ prevails. The youngest son, occasionally the youngest child, inherits the parental home – the principle being that, as each child grows up, finishes school and goes to work, he or she should leave the parental home and fend for themselves. This tends to happen when a family is very poor and has little in the way of property to pass on. The one who is left behind is the youngest. This was the case with Nana, who inherited Agapito’s house after both her parents had died. As I mentioned earlier, though, she gave it to her two older brothers – Tuto and Darius – because they already had families in Bibiclat and were unable to build their own homes there, while she herself was still unmarried and working in Hong Kong at the time. When Nana wanted to build her own house in Bibiclat, her second oldest sister, Viola, lent her a small piece of land, which the two of them now share. Viola intends to build a small house behind Nana’s when her husband, Gusto, retires in two years’ time. This is by no means an unusual arrangement here. It is quite common to see land divided up in this way, as I go on my evening strolls past numerous family compounds with two, three, occasionally four small houses on a single piece of land that was once a field. And which relatives are thought of as the most important? Here, there is no rule of the kind you find in certain East African or Amazonian tribes, where the mother’s brother or father’s sister acts as a kind of surrogate parent. Ideally, kinship is bilateral. In other words, each individual takes into account all relatives on both father’s and mother’s side. With Nana’s family, however, it is Agapito’s, rather than Arsenia’s, relatives who seem to predominate in everyday interaction. This may be in part because Arsenia came from a barangay near the city of Tarlac, a good one hour’s drive away. Also personal likes or dislikes influence whom a child bonds with. Nana seems to have had a special relationship with Viola, with whom she stayed for several years when she started at college in Manila and later went to work in various garment factories. Viola’s daughter,

48 • Ethnography in the Raw

Gianna, who spent several years as a child with her grandparents in Bibiclat, then designed Nana’s house, and Nana seems to have a soft spot for her, since she looked after the girl when she was very young and later when Nana was living in Viola’s family home in Makati. At the same time, Viola is now looking after Tuto’s daughter, Telay, who is finishing school in Manila, so Telay and Gianna have built up a firm bond between them, even though Telay is only seventeen and Gianna twenty-two years old. Such particulars may seem a bit detailed, but they shed some light on what happens when Filipina women go and work abroad in Hong Kong, Dubai, Jeddah, Seoul, even Japan (something I’ll come back to in greater detail later on). Over twenty years ago, when I first lived in Hong Kong, I was astonished to find young mothers working as – what are euphemistically called – domestic helpers (read, ‘close to slaves’), while their, often very young, children were being looked after back home in the Philippines by grandparents, a sister or an aunt. This situation would continue for years until the mother eventually felt able financially to return home – by which time, very often, her children had become grown-up adults. The main reason for such parental deprivation is financial. However poorly paid (by local standards) domestic helpers and other workers are in countries like Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia (they also work in Russia, and several other European countries), they still earn more than they ever would back in the Philippines. In Hong Kong, their average wage comes to approximately £500 a month, while a minimum day’s wage in the Philippines is about 3-400 pesos (£5-£6.50, or £150-175 a month). Overseas workers’ contribution to the GDP of the Philippines economy through financial remittances is legendary – and publicly recognised by its current president, Rodrigo Duterte, who has enacted one or two laws to facilitate their lives abroad. These remissions are often directed at enabling those children left behind to improve their lives and social status by going to senior high school or college and getting better jobs than their parents were able to do. But they also contribute to the overall welfare of the extended family, as when Nana builds a large house enabling her siblings to come and stay in their home village with their families at New Year or other local festive occasions like All Souls Day. Here in Bibiclat, and on national television, ‘Family is love’. Two things are worth noting here. First, the relatively large number of children born in each family unit supports traditional Catholic belief that children are Heaven-sent gifts through the grace of God, and that their birth should not be controlled or interfered with in any

Family • 49

way – something I quickly come to appreciate when three babies are conceived during my stay here by two of Nana’s unmarried teenage nephews and one niece. Second, a slogan like ‘family is love’ is also instrumental. Every child, when grown up, is expected to contribute to the family welfare – either by working in the family fields, or by contributing money earned in other jobs. Blessica’s eldest boy, Joel, for example, has a good job working for J.P. Morgan and supports his mother and younger brother, Nelson, who is still in his early teens. Tété’s elder daughter, Ronaline, sends back monthly remittances to her mother from Canada to make sure she can cope now that her husband Felix is dead. Children, then, are an economic investment, and the more children you have, the more there are for you to depend upon in old age – something that worries Nana, who is childless and thinking of adopting a baby. Love can be selfish, too. Where do we start when trying to unravel family relations here in Bibiclat? Nana is, as I’ve already explained in my discussion of names and role terms, the youngest of eight children by Agapito and Arsenia Aquinez, each of whom has parented (with the exception of Nana) between three and six children. Those thirty cousins, in turn, are busy doing their bit to increase the world’s population, with twenty-one children between them to date (from the eldest four of Nana’s siblings’ children). That makes fifty-nine of Agapito Aquinez’s children and grandchildren so far – a figure that will probably increase by a dozen or so by the time the remaining ten grandchildren come of age and start producing their own families. This may sound rather excessive as far as Europeans and Americans are concerned, but it is the norm among farming families here in Bibiclat. At least you (like myself) can appreciate why Nana insisted on buying an ‘Expander’ car. Relatives are linked by the single obligation to support one another at all times and to assist less fortunate members in time of need. Nana, for example, recently bought her brother Tuto a set of formal clothes (white shirt and black trousers) when he was invited to act as best man at a wedding. Her sister, Blessica, has come to stay in the house for two months and help prepare food for the half dozen workers employed to paint and decorate Nana’s house. Occasionally, Nana will call on her nephew JR to drive us to Manila when I need to go to the airport, and on Tuto himself whenever she needs the backyard strimmed or a water pipe repaired. Requests like these, however suddenly made (and they almost always are sudden), are immediately responded to, regardless of whatever task a particular relative is engaged in at

50 • Ethnography in the Raw

the time. The other evening, Tuto’s younger son, Mandel, was called from duty in the army barracks on the edge of Aliaga to ferry JR from Bibiclat on the back of his motorbike to his home in the neighbouring barangay of Visoria. He arrived at Nana’s house within eight minutes of the call being made. Apparently, the army tolerates such absences and doesn’t make a fuss. Which brings me, indirectly, to the role of the Roman Catholic Church and family planning – or lack thereof. The Vatican forbids, of course, the use of contraceptives (as well as pre-marital sex and abortion). And yet, paradoxically, condoms are readily available in local supermarkets, since other churches – Seventh Day Adventists, Iglesia ni Cristo, Born Again Christians, and so on – do not prohibit their use. Given that several of Nana’s sisters belong to different sects, while others remain true to the Roman Catholic Church, you might understandably expect them to have used condoms. That they for the most part didn’t is witnessed by the numerous children they have borne. Nana excuses them by saying that Filipinos are very shy and don’t want to be seen buying condoms (something I recall from my own youth in England back in the early 1960s, when the disapproving glint in the eye of a middle-aged saleswoman in a chemist’s shop scared the life out of me!). So they go ahead and hope for the best. When that hope fails and a girl becomes pregnant, the man seems to take responsibility (to a degree, at least) and marries her, although in the case of two of Nana’s nephews those marriages, like those of many other young couples, have not lasted long. Because the Catholic Church is so strong here, there is still no sex education in schools. Church and State are unhealthily entwined, although Rodrigo Duterte (or ‘Du 30,’ as he is now jokingly referred to), in the year before he became the country’s President, swore to do something about it by calling the Pope ‘a son of a whore’ (putang ina mo) and telling him not to visit the Philippines again. The Pope thus found himself in the same classificatory category as Barack Obama and Philip Goldberg, former US Ambassador to the Philippines, both of whom were similarly reviled by Duterte. (One assumes, from Trump’s birthing accusations, that Obama’s mother, who was also an anthropologist, was a Kenyan whore.) Duterte has since apologised to the Pope, but not to the two American dignitaries. But to return to family matters and marriage. It seems that there is a strict – informal, at least – prohibition on cousin marriage. And, so far as I can gather, ‘cousin’ refers not just to first, but to second and third cousins. In other words, we’re talking about a marriage prohibition affecting up to four generations. And yet, the Aquinez family has

Family • 51

surprisingly little conscious depth to it. Gianna, for example, who is the youngest daughter of Nana’s second oldest sister, Viola, knows the names of her grandparents, but not those of her great-grandparents. This is quite good. Blessica and Viola (one generation up from Gianna) can only name their grandmother, Guillerma Para Nicolas, but not their grandfather because ‘he already pass away.’ Nana, however, does know his name – Steban – but not the names of either of her grandparents’ siblings (in other words, of her great uncles and aunts). All of which means, as they readily admit, that they wouldn’t necessarily know who their second (let alone their third) cousins were, since their family viewpoint is three generational – centrally located with one generation upwards (aunts and uncles) and another downwards (nephews and nieces), as well as across (cousins). Gianna thus knows the names of all her uncles and aunts, as well as of their children and their children, but, like Nana, not of her grandparents’ siblings, their offspring and their offspring’s offspring. The problem then becomes: how does anyone know if one member of the family is ‘going out with’ a second – or even third or, possibly, by one account, fourth – cousin (although Blessica says that the restriction is limited to third cousins)? They definitely do not go to the Aliaga town hall to check marriage and birth records, although the fact that each individual carries both father’s and mother’s surname might help in tracing back a genealogy (Nana’s surnames, remember, are Ocampo Aquinez). Rather, as in most families around the world, they rely on one of their members being aware of potential problems and alerting the couple (or their parents) to the fact. This is what happened some years ago when Gianna’s eldest brother, Mark, started dating a classmate in high school, and she turned out to be his third cousin. Not that his mother, Viola, was convinced by this explanation. The girlfriend’s father disapproved of Mark, so he made it up about their being cousins. Whatever, the two had to break off their relationship at once. And what’s so wrong about marrying your cousin anyway? After all, in some societies, parallel- or cross-cousin marriage is often preferred (occasionally obligatory). This is true in other parts of the Philippines, too. In a Visayan upland barangay, for example, cousin marriages used to predominate. People preferred to marry within the barrio because the characters of both boy and girl were already known to everyone, whereas that of an outsider was not. A cousin would be loyal and obedient. Moreover, as one man said, by marrying his first cousin he knew, first, that his wife wasn’t a witch and, second, that she wouldn’t poison him!

52 • Ethnography in the Raw

Cousin marriage is also a way of preventing the kind of weakening of family ties that I see potentially happening here. After all, there is a limit – surely – to the number of people one can keep track of ‘in the family’. Three generations are about all the average person can cope with, especially if each member is having from three to six children apiece. It becomes virtually impossible to keep up with all the family fish once you cast the generation net at a greater depth in the sea of offspring. Occasional cousin marriage helps establish borders, of course, and creates or maintains links, between one family and the next. For example, in the pottery community I studied in Japan a few decades ago (as well as in the agricultural communities in the valley below), cousin marriage was a form of exchange (as it is in other societies). A household might ‘give’ away a daughter to a neighbouring household in the community in one generation, and a generation or two later receive a wife for a male heir (or, when there was only a daughter, receive a husband who then adopted his wife’s family name). This give-and-take in marriage and adoption between households could continue intermittently over one or two hundred years, and created a strong bond between the households concerned. At the same time, that bond shouldn’t be too strong since it could create a clique in a small community of between six and a dozen households, for whom community was as important as household. So far, I haven’t had a coherent answer to the question of why cousin marriage is prohibited here. Gianna makes vague mention of ‘incest’. Blessica says that cousin marriage gives rise to problems during pregnancy. Gusto says that the child of a cousin marriage is likely to be ‘touched in the head’, and touches his temple with a lightly clenched fist to reinforce his point. Viola, his wife, adds that, anyway, the Catholic Church forbids it, although where exactly in the Bible the prohibition is written she doesn’t know. Nana improvises: ‘One shouldn’t drink of the blood of one’s own kin’. Blessica says it has nothing to do with Catholicism. ‘The Church doesn’t know you are cousins when they marry you, so how can they stop cousin marriage?’ Whatever, marrying your cousin just isn’t done. Period.

8

For Richer, For Poorer Although it has been said that Bibiclat is one of the richer barangay in Aliaga, I have my doubts. Or, rather, compared with some other barangay I’ve passed through on my travels around the countryside, Bibiclat strikes me as quite poor. Yes, there are a few large houses. Yes, there is the occasional car parked in their forecourts. But this is very much the exception, not the rule. Probably 70-80 per cent of families who live here have a motorbike or tricycle, sometimes a rickety-looking bicycle, and occasionally nothing at all by way of transportation. The barangay is also avoided by jeepnies, whose drivers clearly believe there is not sufficient call for their services to establish a regular run between Bibiclat and – say – Talavera or Cabanatuan. The way people dress also reveals, if not poverty, certainly a lack of wealth. Brightly coloured, though often faded, T-shirts and shorts are the norm for both men and women, although men working outside in the fields and on building sites wear long-sleeved pullovers and balaclava-like headgear to protect them from the sun. Some women wear thin, flower-patterned dresses, jeans or loose trousers. They rarely wear make-up unless they are going out for an ‘occasion’. Schoolchildren wear uniforms – boys in white short-sleeved shirts and long black trousers with black shoes or flip-flops; girls in white short-sleeved blouses, grey tartan skirts, white socks, and usually sandals or flip-flops. Normal footwear consists of flip-flops. Most preschool age children and quite a lot of men go barefoot through the day. This seems more than sensible if, like our painters, you need to climb up and down scaffolding, or balance precariously on a wooden tree branch thrown across an irrigation ditch to allow access to a rice

54 • Ethnography in the Raw

field. I know, if I tried to do the same, I’d end up wallowing in the water with the carabao water buffalo. Under the circumstances, then, it isn’t surprising that young people head off to Manila once they finish school. There is something about capital cities all over the world that attract the young, who firmly believe that they will – against all odds, and in contradiction to historical record – somehow make their fortunes. All of Nana’s sisters, and Nana herself, left Bibiclat to find work in Manila after leaving school. All of them found jobs in factories, but they were almost invariably jobs without security, jobs that could come to an abrupt end with a slight downturn in the economy and loss of export orders. Quite often, leaving Bibiclat and finding work in Manila is seen as a stop-gap measure. People will return to their native village once they’ve made some money. Or so they say. Although they do return from time to time – sometimes, like Tuto, seemingly for good – they rarely make the kind of money that they undoubtedly thought they would when, nervous but starry-eyed, they boarded the bus at Cabanatuan and headed for the capital. People say that wages are higher in Manila, and that that is why they go there to work. But they have to find somewhere to live and buy food to eat – board and lodging that would have been free back

Figure 8.1. Dressed to kill? Teté and JR. © Brian Moeran.

For Richer, For Poorer • 55

home. This is why most younger siblings piggy-back onto an elder brother, sister, uncle or aunt who has gone before them and found somewhere to live. When they left school within a couple of years of each other and headed for the capital, both Teté and Blessica lived with their older sister, Viola, who found them temporary work in the same garment factory when they first arrived. Nana, too, did the same and in return, as I said, looked after Viola’s daughter, Gianna, for several years when she was a teenager. Poverty and the uncertainty of work necessarily bring generations together. The twin concepts of ‘family’ and ‘love’ are designed to combat poverty, to push it out of people’s everyday consciousness. As such, they become a convenient tool used by the rich to get richer, and to ensure that the vast majority of people in the Philippines will continue to be poor. It’s not that some people don’t try to make it back home. JR, whose mother Teté lives in Visoria, tells me that last year he spent several months hawking balót, semi-fertilised ducks’ eggs, on his motorbike around the neighbouring town of Santo Domingo. He used the standard call sign – three short hoots on a motor bicycle horn – to advise local inhabitants of his whereabouts and usually sold a hundred eggs in three or four hours. These he bought at 9.5 pesos and sold for 15 pesos, so he’d make between P500 and P600 a day (£8-10). But it wasn’t enough for a young man who, ideally, wants to open his own motorbike repair shop somewhere near his home, and who needs to save several hundred thousand pesos to do so. So now he’s working as an Uber driver on his motorbike in Manila and earns about P1,500 a day. This he considers a good income, although he has to pay for petrol, of course, and initially for his board and lodging with Viola in Makati. But then he got back together with his wife and child, found a minute apartment to live in, and fathered another child, to add to his financial burden. Still, during the past year, he’s managed to save enough money to buy a second motorbike, which he rents out on a daily basis to another Uber driver friend. He’s heading in the direction he wants, although there is always the possibility that his friend will default on his monthly payments. Wages are often pitiful by our own European standards. At the higher end of the scale, primary school teachers earn P28,000 (£465) a month, plus benefits that include two months’ maternity leave. At the lowest end, the two women working in a massage and nail parlour in Aliaga that we visited a week or so ago said that they received a paltry 100 peso (£1.65) wage for a twelve-hour day. This was supplemented, as in the case of those working in restaurants in the West, by tips,

56 • Ethnography in the Raw

and it was the expectation of tips that made these masseuses accept such badly paid conditions. Still, farm workers, hired for the tomato or onion harvest, for example, earn the same amount for ten hours of hard labour in the fields in blazing sunshine – and don’t get tips. Nor do they have the luxury of a massage and nail parlour’s air conditioning. So, by comparison, the massage ladies must feel they’ve got a good deal. Everything is relative. The workers who will be accompanying Tuto and Actually and working on Nana’s house over the next couple of months earn between P300 and P400 a day, while Actually and Tuto themselves earn P500. Those who come from the same barangay as the house they are working on receive free food during the day – including coffee before work starts, a mid-morning cooked merienda, a cooked lunch, and a mid-afternoon snack. Those who, like Actually and his assistants, come from a different barangay have to provide their own food. This is, however, just a working rule. Nana has told two of the painters, who come from elsewhere, that she’ll feed them, together with three others from Bibiclat. After all, cooking for five is hardly any more work than cooking for three. Gary and Julius clearly appreciate this. They have worked hard and, unlike their local co-workers, never miss a day, even after a heavy drinking session the night before. In Wilcon, a ‘B&Q’-style hardware store in Cabanatuan, a cashier and salesman told me they received a Nueva Ecija minimum wage of P400 a day – the same sum that Teté’s third son, Ace, gets for working in a Talavera supermarket. They suggested that different regions have different legislation regarding what is, or is not, a minimum wage. One sales manager, who was six months pregnant, said that – like primary school teachers – she received two months’ maternity leave and was hoping that President Duterte would sign a new law passed by Congress stipulating a 109-day maternity leave (a month later he did so). At this point, Brits and other Europeans (note that inclusive word) will probably explode with self-righteous indignation: ‘But these wages are ridiculous!’ And ridiculous indeed they are by their standards. But it initially cost Nana £20,000, not £200,000, to build the structure for her three-bedroom concrete house. Kitchen cupboards, beds, dining tables, sofa, and so on were proportionally cheap, when it came to furnishing the house. Food costs less and other (super) market prices here are comparably low. Nana has also been offered two hectares of prime farmland for P1.2 million (£20,000) – a price that Nana’s family members regard as much too high. One million would be more reasonable. But people know she has worked abroad

For Richer, For Poorer • 57

for eleven years; she must be rich. And she has a foreign husband; she must be richer! Some local people probably think Nana got a bargain when she married me. Care and loving attention for all the money she needs in her everyday life. Personally, I think it was I who got the bargain when we married – for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer. This is the way the world ends. With a whimper or a bang?

9

Chaos and Laughter The other day Nana complained (though she is not the complaining kind) that I am ‘inflexible’, and by her standards I most certainly am. But then, I haven’t lived before in a country where people seem not to understand the concept of ‘planning’ (Greece was the nearest I’ve been to it before) and so waste an awful lot of time and energy getting things done on the spur of one moment after another! Nana regards planning as a waste of time. Plans inevitably change when you get down to doing whatever it is you planned to do. Why not just let things be? As people like to say, go with the flow. I don’t know if Nana’s family is the exception or the rule – I suspect it is an extreme example of the latter – but I’ve noticed that it is impossible to embark upon a conversation about something, without being interrupted by someone else asking about something totally different. As a result, sustained discussion – even getting an uninterrupted answer to one of my questions – seems virtually impossible. All the information I glean is piecemeal, although I think I get there in the end. A question about language, for example, is answered by way of a series of interruptions concerning such random topics as Gianna’s design of the house, what’s going on with Teté’s pigs, Actually’s work on the rooftop railings, what we need to buy for the workers’ lunch, and so on. In other words, what we in England, or other northern European countries, would call ‘a conversation’ on a sustained topic is here often a series of intersecting running commentaries, which tend to feed off one another throughout the day. This takes some getting used to. I have a feeling that by wanting me to be more ‘flexible’, Nana wants me to sink into what is for her the

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comfort of what I regard as little short of chaos! Chaos means you need people to help you out; it maintains a sense of community. And people are what matters. People help you obtain a driving license without bothering, or needing, to take the test. They help you get something quicker, cheaper, even for free, when normal channels would take forever. They drop everything when asked to do something on the spur of the moment. And they anticipate that you will do the same in future. Chaos encourages give and take. It is the basis upon which society here is built. But there is something else that attracts my attention in this note on chaos: humour. Although I don’t want to extend the misconception that poor and backward peoples are always ‘happy’, I cannot overlook the fact that Nana’s family and friends find plenty to laugh about whenever they gather round the dining room table. Indeed, there are times when the sisters – even though not lying on the ground and kicking their legs in the air in paroxysms of laughter, like the pygmies described by one anthropologist – relapse into convulsive fits of laughter that reduce them to tears. In other words, into what I can only describe as a ‘giggle fest’. Why is this? All sorts of people have written about humour – usually in an extremely humourless way – from different theoretical perspectives, and I don’t intend to catalogue them here. Still, one dominant theme emerges: that humour and its accompanying laughter assert a spontaneity and freedom that counters mechanistic rigidity in either intellectual logic or social order. Like chaos, humour, together with its accompanying laughter, plays havoc with expected behaviour. Just as chaos encourages social cohesion, humour, by pointing to absurdities in people’s behaviour, words and deeds, acts as a corrective to rigid behaviour. There is method, then, in the madness of both chaos and humour. Laughter is always the laughter of a group – of family, friends, communities and nations, or of shared age, gender and class. As such it implies a complicity with those with whom we laugh. Laughter needs other people, in the same way that chaos does. Like humour, chaos overrides orderly thought and social norms. Is this, then, one reason why Filipinos appear to laugh so much? They use humour to come to terms with an unfair society in which, as rural villagers or factory workers, they are deprived of equality and humanity by a small and elite class of ultra-wealthy and powerful families who rule the country. In this way, their humour promotes social cohesion. In laughing together, in refusing to engage in ‘planning’, people like Nana and her sisters identify with a range of shared cultural meanings

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that sets them apart from, and in the process perpetuates the social control of, the ruling class. So humour is a coping mechanism. At the same time, though, it reframes social situations and celebrates an alternative to rationality and order. It often communicates ambiguities and, occasionally, expresses hostility. I remember how Nana and her domestic helper friends in Hong Kong used to gather every afternoon to share childcare duties, to cook food for one another, and to imitate the ways of speaking and behaviour of their – mainly European – employers and the children that they had to look after for twelve hours a day, six days a week. By so doing, they were able to turn the tables on their social superiors and become themselves superior for a few hours. Humour helped them cope with their social position as an underclass of immigrant workers. I guess the subconscious reasoning for their behaviour was that by telling humorous anecdotes, they felt able to get the better of a painful situation (looking after other people’s children acted as a bitter reminder of their own children they had left at home in the Philippines). Humour positively transformed them emotionally because it made these painful aspects of their lives as domestic helpers more acceptable and so less threatening in what was otherwise an extremely alien environment. Their laughter liberated them, turning inferiority into superiority. It reminded them that the seeming normality of a European family, the way that family thought things should be in terms of cooking, cleaning and children’s upbringing, was in fact not normal by their own Filipino standards. In this way, they regained their humanity.

10

Language Use Life in Bibiclat has begun to take on its own kind of rhythm (albeit an often unpredictable rhythm since the people who surround me are, as I mentioned, fairly impulsive). Having never been an early riser, I do my best to sleep, generally unsuccessfully, through the dawn cacophony of cocks crowing, dogs yapping, children shouting, endless motorbikes and tricycles ferrying people to who knows where, and, in this festive season at least, music of one sort or another blared out at all hours of the night from the local church’s tannoy system (on Christmas Day, at 3.00 am, the village was regaled with that catchy pop song: ‘All I want for Christmas is you’ – which, during daylight hours, I might have enjoyed, if I hadn’t heard it a dozen times already in the past two or three days!). After breakfast, I usually devote myself to reading my Pilipino/ Tagalog phrase book for an hour or so, but after that anything can happen until some time between 4 and 5 pm when I usually go for a walk with one of Nana’s nephews and Teté’s second son, JR (which stands for Jayson Ryan), who has been hired for a month as our oddjob man-about-the-house. JR starts each day by cleaning the Xpander, which means I now possess the cleanest car I have ever owned. Later he prepares lunch, before taking me, as I said, for my early evening constitutional. As we walk along a long concreted dead-end road through rice and vegetable fields – a road which eventually ends up on the banks of a muddy river – JR teaches me a few basic Pilipino words for what we see in the fields (bukid): rice (palai), tomatoes (kamátis), chillis (sili), French beans (buto), and onions (sebúyas; read Spanish cebollas). I also

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remember that a farm is hasienda, and that the days and months, as well as numbers up to thirty-one, are basically the same as in Spanish, with, as you can judge, Pilipino phonetic spelling (so that jueves, for example, becomes huwebes and cinco, singko). It seems that how loanwords are pronounced and spelled depends in large part on when they were incorporated into the language. Telephones, which have been around for a long time, are called telepono (after the Spanish, teléfono); computers, however, are written in the same way as English, computer, rather than konpyuter, because the word only came into use in the mid-1980s. You’ve no doubt noticed how I’ve been writing Pilipino, not Filipino? This is in part an affectation, based on the fact that there is no /f/ in the language (as the spelling of telephone above reveals). But it’s also because the official language of the Philippines is Pilipino, which is basically Tagalog with a few words borrowed here and there from one of the country’s several dozen dialects. Tagalog itself is the language used by the people who originally settled in the southern part of Luzon, where Manila lies. It was adopted as the basis for Pilipino a few years before the Pacific War, although speakers of other large linguistic groups, like those in the Visayas, felt that they had as legitimate a claim. Some, however, have more recently claimed that Pilipino is a fossilised language preserved only by the academy and that the people of the Philippines do indeed speak Filipino which they see as an ever-changing, living language full of borrowings and inventive neologisms. Still, we should realize that neither Pilipino, nor Filipino, has a voiceless bilabial fricative /f/ sound. As a result, the Spanish words familia, fresco and frito become pamilya, presko and prito in Tagalog. I’ve even heard Felix referred to as Pelix (which may be why his nickname, when alive, was the unproblematic Ekek). This leads to the occasional delightful confusion, as when one of Nana’s sisters asked me whether I’d like ‘the serving pork’, with which to help myself to some vegetables, and another used the word ‘plug’ to refer to the national ‘flag’. Nana herself has talked in the past of a ‘pig tree’ and, to really confuse the issue, ‘fashion fruit’! So the fricative /f/ is not totally impossible for a Pilipino, who may occasionally refer to a refrigerator as fritz, as well as pritz – which would, I’m sure, make any German electrical appliances manufacturer happy to hear. The voiced fricative /v/ is also found – notably in people’s and place names (like Viernes and Visoria), but for the most part it is pronounced, as in Castilian Spanish, as a /b/: biyernes, for example, for Viernes (Friday); and bibisita for visit.

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I’m reminded of the occasion when I asked Nana’s nephew, JR, about the name of Visoria, the village in which he lived. ‘Is the first letter a /b/ or a /v/?’ I asked. ‘/B/’, he replied, ‘As in /b/ for bictory’ – which, to add to my confusion, is a perfectly good word in the Tagalog-English dictionary, where it is spelt ‘victory’! My favourite mistake to date, though, has nothing to do with pronunciation. Our Jack of all trades, Jason – or, as we like to call him, Actually – several times last week asked me if he should ‘put in the lightning upstairs’. Once the lightning had been duly installed, without so much as a thunderclap from the Pilipino equivalent of Zeus, Actually then asked if he could install more lightning downstairs. We now have lots of lightning – fortunately lasting more than the average 0.2 seconds of a lightning flash – from very few light bulbs. What we haven’t had yet is the Second Coming of Jesus. I guess, for me at least, the most intriguing thing about Tagalog is its speakers’ use of English, which people freely intersperse among all the Pilipino words and phrases. Some writers call this ‘Taglish’, which is described as ‘a bastard hybrid used by broadcasters, government officials, anyone fancying themselves as at all sophisticated’. For a linguistic anthropologist, bilingualism is an intriguing topic, because it allows one to look at language interference and, possibly, draw tentative conclusions about cultural norms from how much, or which parts, of one, borrowed language are used and ‘interfere’ with the other, ‘native’ language. I remember, many years ago, tape recording my twelve-year-old son, Alyosha, after we’d returned to England from four years in Japan, and learning that his English was in fact layered on top of a basic Japanese sentence structure, whereas with my younger son, Maya, it was the other way round. Was this difference due to the fact that, while both boys had been born in Japan, Alyosha had been three when he was first exposed to everyday English, whereas Maya had been only one? Did this explain the cognitive difference between the two nine years later? Anyway, to return to my topic, there are usually rules of some sort guiding people in bilingual situations and influencing their choice of words and phrases. ‘Heavy’ topics like politics, education, the economy, and so on often provide the non-native overlay, while topics closer to home – including family, food, religion, art and other cultural themes – use the native language. But I have, as yet, encountered no such rules when Filipinos (Pilipinos) mix up Tagalog (which is, as I’ve said, already laced with Spanish words like trabáyo, negócio, dirétso, puwéde, peró, segúro, and so on) with English.

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Clearly Taglish, as this mixture is commonly called, is a kind of Creole or Pidgin language (and the two are not the same, but who are you to care!). And, just when you think it consists merely of foreign words and/or phrases tagged on to a basic Pilipino language structure just for the sake of a bit of superiority on the speaker’s part, which it does and is, you suddenly hear long sentences in English, with the occasional Pilipino word inserted (for emphasis, for fun, for status, for what?). To me, then, how English is used in the midst of Tagalog is an unruly mystery! Try this tweet for size and judge for yourselves what a lot is tagged on in Tagalog. The tweet refers to Catriona Gray, who, as Ms Philippines, at the end of December 2018 won the Miss Universe crown – to the delight of one and all across the nation (even though she is only half Pilipino and was born and brought up in Australia): Cat has set a very high standard. Ganyan mag represent ng country, from the paandar to the next, may meaning and hugot. Ganyan magshowcase ng beauty and brain. Kahit sa smallest detail magiging proud ka what philippines has to offer.

Taglish at its most expressive? Still, I have a feeling that Taglish is far harder to speak naturally than Tagalog itself.

11

New Year’s Eve It’s New Year’s Eve – the time when families gather together. This year, everybody – but everyone – seems to be descending upon Nana in her new home (which makes me understand why she had such a large house built – the Mitsubishi Xpander principle once again!). They’ve been trickling in from Manila in twos and threes over the past three days to make it seem less like the invasion of the hoard that it really is. The first arrivals are Gianna and Telay, the daughters of Nana’s older sister, Viola, and brother, Tuto (who lives in Bibiclat, but Telay goes to school in Manila and lives there now with Viola in Makati). Then, Sherwin, Teté’s youngest son, turns up with his brother JR, followed by Viola, her husband, Gusto, and grandson, JanJan. Late at night, Blessica arrives with her oldest, and rather large, son, Joel, together with her eleven-year-old youngest, John Carlo. The next morning, her twin daughters, Karen and Camille, also large (‘When they are babies, I give them five-star milk,’ laughs Blessica happily, with the customary disregard for the past tense), turn up at breakfast time. Others are expected later today: Teté, and two more of her sons – Bryan, plus maybe Ace, his wife, and baby; Tuto and his wife Avelina with their remaining children; and, possibly, Dar, his wife Marifé, and their children. All the same, I may be lucky. Both Viola and Blessica laughingly tell me that Aquinez family gatherings like this used to be even larger when Agapito was alive. When I ask how big, they reply, ‘Half of Bibiclat!’ and cackle loudly. They all have to be fed, of course. I’m not sure whether it’s a blessing or not that different people seem to want to eat breakfast at different times. It keeps the sisters busy, at least. But food also

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has to be procured. A second visit in two days to the wet market in Aliaga is imminent, although a call by Blessica for coconut (‘Coconut water is good for kidneys’) quickly has one of Tuto’s sons, Mandel, shinning up the palm tree at the back of the lot of land on which Nana lives. Large green coconuts are dropped and no deity or spirit – evil or otherwise – will spare you, if you happen to be underneath one when it falls. You’d end up being seriously ‘touched in the head’. This explains the similarity – somewhat deviously devised on my part – between a coconut and cousin marriage. So, a lot of cooking has to be done and, since men aren’t expected to help, I can sit out in the garden of astro-turf where, for the moment at least, it is quiet, and write up these notes. I’m not sure how seating arrangements inside will survive a mass gathering at lunch and dinner, although the fact that it is warm and has stopped raining for now suggests that we can use the table and chairs outside. At some stage, when tiredness finally overcomes everyone, at least half of those already here will be sleeping in the house, although where, exactly, I have no idea. There is a sofa downstairs which comfortably fits two, but will doubtless end up sleeping twice as many. And there are three not-that-wide double beds upstairs. Given that the Aquinez family has a propensity to fit five or six of its members in one bed, they may end up not sleeping on the floor. Who knows! Thankfully, Nana doesn’t seem disposed to allow anyone else into our bed. Not that any of us will get much sleep tonight. The New Year is the occasion when all the evil spirits must be driven out, which means that people make as much noise as they possibly can during the hours before and after midnight, with fireworks, Chinese crackers, whistles, horns, and much shaking of empty cans filled with coins. Since they aren’t averse to noise during their normal everyday lives, New Year provides them with an excuse for creative embellishments, which – apart from the customary ghetto blasting music from passing motor tricycles – includes removing the silencers off motorbikes and revving them up and down the village road throughout the evening and night. Nobody has yet attached a loudspeaker system to the fighting cocks, so that their crows sound even louder and more cacophonous, but I’m expecting that to happen on one New Year’s Eve in the future. Exactly who the evil spirits are seems to be something nobody has thought about much. Gusto laughs in a slightly embarrassed way and says, helpfully, that the spirits are evil because they are bad. Blessica struggles for an explanation and then says, ‘they’re bastards!’ before collapsing into one of her customary fits of laughter. Are they ghosts of some kind?

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‘No, not ghost’. Not dead spirits or souls of people or animals? ‘No, alive’. Can you see them? ‘No. No see’. How do you know they are around? ‘They just are!’ But where? Are they in the trees? The houses? ‘Sometimes’, says Blessica, ‘When a house is empty, spirit come into the house. Then you must make a lot of noise, and they go’. How? Do they walk? Fly? ‘They go in the air’. My persistent questions elicit an exasperated ‘Oh George!’ from Nana, which again gets everyone giggling uncontrollably. ‘Oh George!’ is the response parents give to children who keep on asking ‘Why this? Why that? Why? Why? Why?’ The anthropologist is reduced to second childhood. Meanwhile, cooking is proceeding apace. The men – JR, Tuto, and Gusto – seem to be in charge of roasting a whole pig that Teté and Ace killed a few days ago. It is, after all, about to be the Year of the Pig, according to the Chinese, although Japanese are, with this zodiac sign, Figure 11.1. Tuto and Gusto roasting a pig. © Brian Moeran.

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for once rather more masculine and call it the Year of the Wild Boar. But the way the three men laugh and joke reminds me of funerals in the Japanese valley where I lived for four years three decades ago: the men cooked rice outside, while the women worked inside preparing the rest of the funeral meal for the community. Here they skewer the pig with an aluminium rod left over from Actually’s construction of a railing round the roof terrace wall earlier this week. Then they pose for a photo, place the pig carefully on the two forked branches they’ve prepared, and turn it slowly over the ash-grey embers from a tree branch that has been burning for some time now. Tuto invites me to try a piece of its skin, which is crisp and tasty, and which he himself – to judge by a broad patch of skinless cooked meat on one side of the pig – has been sampling for some time now. Meanwhile, Nana is thinking about marinating a large turkey that we bought in the supermarket in Cabanatuan a couple of days ago, while Viola is frying a large wok full of minced beef. On the table is a big dish with what should be twelve different fruits (bananas, apples, melon, tangerines, dragon fruit and avocado) – one for each month of the year – but Nana has only four left (the melon and dragon fruit were consumed over lunch), so she adds potatoes and onions to make up some of the perceived deficit. And the typhoon that was enjoying itself down in Bicol, south-east of Manila, seems to have decided to come northwards this way. The sky is overcast. There are occasional squalls of light rain. And it’s getting windier by the hour. Still, it’s little more than a gentlemanly breeze. Nothing to get worked up about. Yet. The afternoon draws slowly into evening. JR cuts up the pig, which fills three large dishes. Nana has decided not to roast the turkey because there’s already too much food. Blessica and Viola have made a mass of rather sweet spaghetti Bolognese. I’m instructed to open a box of Franzia red wine, which arrived only yesterday in an enormous box of personal effects that Nana sent from Hong Kong before she left a month ago. The boys drink it as if it’s beer or Coke, so I am further instructed to instruct them in how to properly enjoy it. This has the hoped-for effect. They switch to their local fruity gin brew! By 7 pm the noise in the garden is competing with that in the street, where the ‘lads’ are busy showing their skills revving their bikes and shooting off on their back wheels into the village. The ghetto blaster is out and we tuck into our meal accompanied by Chris de Bergh and Phil Collins. Voices get louder; the laughter even more unfettered. The music is changed to disco rave. Gusto blows a horn loudly. Somebody

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lets off a firework – nothing grand about it; just a rocket of the kind we used to let off when I was a kid. Once we’ve finished eating – some of us indoors, others in the garden, where it is spitting with rain again – Viola and Blessica suddenly start dancing a combination of disco and belly dance, to the delight of one and all, and before a minute has passed, all the women have stepped out onto the astro-turf and are shaking their bodies rhythmically to the music. One thing I’ve learned about Filipinas is that they love to party. Usually, any excuse will do, but this is New Year so no excuse is needed. The next hour or two are devoted to each branch of the family (including Nana and myself) showing its paces. Then come silly games devised by Gianna who takes over as MC for the lead up to midnight: Tuto and Nelson (Blessica’s youngest boy) trying to eat a bobbing apple on a string without using their hands; two teams of teenagers trying to be the first to separate out all the different colours of a very large bag of Smarties; others searching blindfold for folded notes (mainly of 20 pesos each, but including one of 100 and another of 500 pesos [£7.50]) in a bucket – all accompanied by the customary cheating that family members always seem to enjoy, to the delight of everyone who add their laughter and screams to the already cacophonous night. By the time the last game is over, Tuto’s older son, Marlon, has placed each of a dozen rockets in one of the bamboo slats that form the perimeter fence. He finds an ember from the fire that cooked the

Figure 11.2. Party time. © Brian Moeran.

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pig and starts to light the rockets one by one. Two or three shoot up into the sky, which is now being set alight by other fireworks from houses round about. But the job isn’t quite as easy as the young man had imagined because the ember goes out and he has to find another one to light the last three rockets. Dad steps in to help, until, dutifully, each rocket fizzes with a whoosh up into the night – where a mass of other fireworks with their bangs and crackles play their part, together with the whistles, horns, music and motorbikes, in driving out the bad spirits and making the New Year safe for us all. ‘Happy New Year!’ cry Tuto and Gusto shaking my hand, after the last rocket has been safely despatched, their teeth bared white in the dark. ‘Happy New Year!’ I look at my watch which is Japanese and accurate to the second. There are still two minutes and six seconds to go to midnight, but who cares! The local church seems determined not to admit to the passing of time, and, at eight the following morning, rings out a series of pop music Christmas songs. The occasional motorbike passing by has its silencer back on. The house, too, is eerily quiet. There is one body on the sofa, but apparently Viola and her family left in the middle of the night, at 4 am, to go back to Manila while the traffic was still light. Blessica and her children appear in dribs and drabs for breakfast. Joel pats his mother on her bum – something I would have recoiled from doing in my youth. We chat quietly, and, after holding off for the most part last night, the rain comes pouring down. Lightning is forecast. I have a feeling the weather report isn’t referring to Actually’s light bulbs.

12

Mobile Phones and Social Media Filipinos are the world’s most frequent users of the Internet. In 2005, they earned the, possibly dubious, reputation of being the ‘texting capital’ of the world as they sent something like 250 million text messages daily. According to the BBC, they now spend more than ten hours a day surfing, playing games and communicating with friends on social media. Both Nana and Blessica, and Teté when she comes here, are glued to their phone screens for large parts of the day (and occasionally in the middle of the night). Nana is in constant communication with her friends back in Hong Kong; Blessica with her family and friends in Cavite, Makati and other parts of the capital. I’ve yet to see anyone here reading a book. Regardless, I’ve decided to put my size twelve foot firmly down. After tolerating what I regard as a very bad habit for a few meals, ‘Unkel’ has made it clear that nobody should bring a mobile phone to table, where ‘multi-tasking’ should consist of eating and conversation only. Sherwin, to whom the rule was first applied because of his total failure to speak while eating, reluctantly put his phone screen-down on the table beside him until he had – silently – finished his meal, whereupon he quickly picked it up and continued under-the-table texting. I ticked him off, and he slunk off to the sofa to embark on what seemed like continuous engagement in game warfare of some kind or another – to judge by the accompanying noises, which I have also asked be silenced when others are trying to have a conversation or watch the dreaded TV soap dramas in the evening.

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Word has got around stealthily, it seems, through local coconut palm tree drums, or a series of Tipperary tip-offs, and other nephews and nieces have learned of my disapproval of mobile phones at table. When called for lunch yesterday, Joel (who had only been here for 36 hours) reprimanded the larger of his twin sisters, Nicole, and, when she failed to respond, without further ado took her earphones off and discarded them on the sofa. This victory for Unkel was, alas, somewhat Pyrrhic since, free from distraction, Nicole concentrated on eating even more than usual. I’ve never seen so much rice spooned into a woman’s mouth in such a short space of time. Mobile phones are an interesting social phenomenon, putting an end to old, and initiating new, forms of communication which themselves bring about both intended and unintended consequences. Those of us who were adults in the 1980s will recall how car phones were introduced in England and how these chunky, somewhat unwieldy devices became a status symbol among yuppies (a newly coined appellation) and private car-hire chauffeurs. A few years later, when I moved to Hong Kong, the first fully mobile phones were in fairly constant use. Monks sat with them on their restaurant table tops in case Buddha or the Almighty called. Would-be hedge fund managers commanded the buying and selling of large numbers of Figure 12.1. Sherwin, without mobile phone. © Brian Moeran.

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blue chip shares in loud voices while drinking in bars – only to be interrupted by the ring of an incoming call (which revealed that their financial transactions were entirely fake, designed to impress their friends and acquaintances). Everyone, it seemed, suddenly found it really necessary to call up their spouses in a bus or on a subway train to tell them they’d be home in half an hour. This was the beginning of the public announcement of private matters, the time when the borders of privacy itself as a concept contracted, occasionally ceased to exist. How often, now, on different forms of public transport, do we have to put up with one-sided conversations about who said what to whom, with what result, and how things might have ended up differently if only Tina or Vicky, Rob or Sean (Shaun) hadn’t drunk so much, quit his or her job, said what s/he’d meant, or got married to that nice boy (or girl) across the street. If I were, by chance, to rule the world, one of the first laws I’d enact would be to prohibit the oral usage of mobile phones on any form of public transport. Am I being extreme in my dotage? I don’t think so. This is the norm in Japan, where privacy still matters. And then there are social media. Nowadays all of us, both young and old, make use of one or more of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, WeChat, Instagram, LinkedIn, and all the rest of those sites to which we are more or less addicted. Yes, addicted. Some of my friends say that they’ve had withdrawal symptoms when, for one reason or another, they stopped participating in one of these sites. I felt the same way, too, for several days when I stopped using Instagram and wondered if there was anyone in the normal world who still ‘liked’ my photographs and, by extension, me. When and how did all this come about? When I lived and worked at the University of Hong Kong between 1992 and 1998, like many other ex-pats, we employed a Filipina nanny, Bing, to look after our new-born daughter, since my wife and I were both employed full time. Like most other Filipinas so employed, Bing had children of her own. Like everyone else, too, she had Sundays off and would go and see her friends somewhere in Central on the island of Hong Kong, where thousands of chattering voices made it seem as if the business and shopping centre had been taken over by birds. These ‘birds’ would make their nests of cardboard boxes arranged in long lines on the overhead walkways, and there they would spend the day eating, drinking, chatting, playing cards, exchanging trinkets, buying cosmetics from friends, and catching up on lost sleep. What these domestic helpers did not possess at the time were mobile phones. So, in order to keep in touch with their relatives back home –

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like Bing, most of the women had left young children in the care of their parents or sisters – they would go to World Wide House, whose lower floors were akin to a Filipino bazaar with their banks, money exchange desks, stores and stalls selling everything they needed from back home. There they would queue up in lengthy lines – all the while chattering and, as ever, laughing happily – as they waited to use one of a small handful of telephones that offered cheap international calls to the Philippines. These calls were rationed in time to ensure that nobody hogged a line and that all would get to talk to their loved ones before their holiday was over. Then came the mobile phone. When she first went to Hong Kong in April 2005, Nana had the kind of old-style (i.e. pre-Smart) mobile phone most people had at that time, with just a keypad. It took her three years to save up enough money to go with a friend, Molly May, and together each buy a new, pay-as-you-go, Sony Experia smart phone (the smart phone was invented, and later marketed as the Simon Personal Communicator by IBM, back in 1992, I was surprised to learn – fifteen years before Apple released its first iPhone). This made it easier for her to keep in touch with her friends in Hong Kong, since the phone allowed simultaneous group chats by up to five people. It was, however, still expensive to use. Because she lived and worked in Mid-Levels, just above Central, and Molly May and her other friends were scattered around Hong Kong island, Nana ended up buying phone vouchers for them and charging an agreed mark-up of 10 per cent. She thus got HK$5 for every $50 voucher she sold – a useful income that partially covered the monthly usage of her own phone which, at the time, was HK$300 (or 7.5 per cent of her monthly wage). Smart phones brought an end to the patient queueing of Filipina domestic helpers in World Wide House every Sunday, but they were still expensive to run. People could use social media like Friendster (2002) and Viva – both very popular in the Philippines – but these were being replaced by newer and more versatile sites like Skype (2003), Facebook (2004), and WhatsApp (2009). So, like many of her friends, on Sundays Nana would go to Internet ‘cafés’ in ‘Alley Alley’ (as the Filipinas call Li Yuen Street East and West) off Des Voeux Road, and talk to her family and friends back in Bibiclat and Manila. Because of its versatility in using WhatsApp and Facebook in particular, Nana ‘graduated,’ via a Samsung, to her first iPhone in 2011. This enabled immediate communication with everyone she knew, both in Hong Kong and back in the Philippines, provided she had an Internet connection.

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It was about this time that Philippine telecom companies began to offer especially discounted (HK$50) unlimited Internet use for five months at a time, so she took advantage of these offers, before moving to a new job in Mui Wo on south Lantau Island where she could use her employers’ Internet connection for free. She would buy the occasional voucher for Sunday use, but that was all the expense that communicating with her family and friends involved until she left Hong Kong at the end of November 2018. If we see Nana’s mobile phone history as typical of Filipinas working abroad, whether in the Middle East, Hong Kong or other parts of Asia (and elsewhere), we can see the immense good these technologies have brought about in helping these incredibly hardworking women (and men) to stay in touch with their children and other members of their families back home. This hasn’t been without its problems, though. While technology has mitigated some of the negative effects of working abroad, it has also complicated the already complex relationships between domestic helpers and their husbands. Each has to deal with two opposing forces: one, the changed realities in a Filipino family brought about by the mother’s move abroad to work; the other, traditional expectations of family roles in Philippine society. I remember the difficulty another of Nana’s friends had while we lived in Hong Kong. Her husband was looking after their two small children, and Flor would call them as often as she could to talk to them all and remind them that their mother was very much alive and well. And yet, precisely because she’d been in Hong Kong for several years, working for a Polish family, while making friends and consorting with other domestic helpers from different parts of the Philippines, Flor’s own horizons were expanding. This created an even greater experiential chasm dividing her from her immediate family. Even though she was aware of this paradox, there was nothing she could do about it, other than to give up her job and go back home to join her husband and children. But then they wouldn’t have had the money she was earning for her children’s future. Mobile technology contributes to a sense of isolation in another way, I think. Nana, for example, used to spend several evenings a week catching up on two popular TV soaps while in Hong Kong, and knew all the latest hit songs which, like many of her compatriots, she’d sing or hum while washing up dishes, tidying and cleaning her employers’ home (on occasion, she’d even teach their children to sing them). So, she was abreast of some of what was going on in the Philippines while she was away. But, precisely because she was only partly plugged into

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developments back home (not all TV programmes were available on the Internet), she could also feel a certain sense of loss, of nostalgia for the whole of a life she’d left behind. So, there’s been a bit of ‘swings and roundabouts’ in the adoption of mobile technology by Filipinas abroad. All the same, mobile communication and migration (something I’ll come back to later) combine to form the most distinctive feature, perhaps, of contemporary Philippine society. I think it fair to say that mobile phones and social media create a level playing field for their users. Nowadays, there are no marked differences in the Philippines between rich and poor in terms of mobile-phone ownership and use. Both groups consider the mobile phone essential and necessary in their daily transactions and interaction. Where there is a difference, though, is in their choice of mobile-phone brands, models and services, as well as in their modes of payment. On the one hand, the rich pay cash for top of the line Android, iPhone and Samsung Galaxy mobile phones; on the other, poorer people generally buy the cheaper models and prefer prepaid plans or electronic loading (like Nana in Hong Kong). Some of them turn to more affordable secondhand and reconditioned mobile phones, and they pay for these products and/ or services on an installment basis. A fair number receive new or old phones as gifts from their relatives who are better off than them, as I know from my own experience when one of my ‘cast offs’ went to one of Nana’s nieces. This levelling process applies to poor indigenous groups scattered in remote parts of the country’s 2,000 inhabited islands. Nowadays they, too, have become regular users of mobile phones, but a decade ago only relatively few of them knew about this new gadget’s existence. Those that did often set up and operated a ‘community’ mobile phone – a bit like cafés in Spain back in the 1960s, which installed TV sets for their customers who couldn’t afford to buy their own sets. I remember watching the Tokyo Olympics that way when I lived in Valencia. For the price of a cup of coffee, I could sit for hours watching different events. Similarly, a barangay captain would often own a community mobile phone and charge local villagers two pesos a time to use it. With more affordable prices, of course, the community mobile phone has gone out of use these days, just as we now watch TV programmes mostly at home. I guess what’s scary is the fact that a mobile phone – especially a smart phone – is a ‘must have’ status symbol and, for young people, a kind of fashion statement. Apparently, a lot of poor and indigenous peoples in the Philippines allocate a relatively large proportion of their

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meagre incomes to purchasing, loading and operating mobile phones, at the expense of more basic needs like food, clothing and housing. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family, therefore, takes precedence over everything else and encourages an arbitrary and capricious use of household income. So, social media and the technologies they use actively help people who, for one reason or another, are separated from their loved ones: those serving in the armed forces and stationed abroad, for example; or others condemned to live eight months of the year in private boarding school (in my case, from the tender age of five). They have also become incredibly useful, life-saving even, in upheavals caused by natural disasters – like Typhoon Haiyan (what Filipinos call Super Typhoon Yolanda) in 2013 – when traditional communication channels are disrupted. For better and for worse, they’re used to enable popular movements, electoral campaigns, the provision of instantly up-to-date ‘news’ and information, scientific research, and other educational practices. To cite just one example, mobile phones are said to have facilitated the coordination of the vast street protests that took place during the political upheaval of EDSA II in 2001. These led to the ousting of then President Estrada, and to the elevation of the mobile phone as a symbol of people’s power. Still, what this old geezer can’t abide is people who, eyes glued to their screens, almost bump into him and other pedestrians while walking in the street; or young couples who sit in Starbucks and send each other text messages, rather than have a real-life conversation. When I encounter this sort of behaviour, I find I’m not all that averse to dying, although I suspect that technological and biological developments will eventually make it possible for the dead to be buried with their mobile devices, which they can then use to communicate with the friends and relatives they’ve left behind. Beyond the pale, indeed!

13

Irrigation There is a large dry ditch running along the side of Nana’s compound, partly filled with discarded rubbish and fallen fronds from the banana and coconut trees that line the fence. One afternoon just after New Year, I hear water flowing and, peeking over the bamboo fence, see that the ditch is full of water. Its continuation, the other side of the road, is the same, a narrow strip of a mirror reflecting the clouds as it stretches into the fields. It is irrigation time. Later, as I walk through the village, I notice other ditches filled with gurgling brown water, weaving its way under house entrances and along the sides of roads. As I head out towards the fields, I pass three breeze-block and bamboo homes standing in the midst of a small lake of muddy water. Their owners have to paddle more than ankle-deep through it to get in or out of their houses (in which I can see the flickering lights of TV sets). The fields beyond them are well and truly flooded from a broad water course whose sluices gather all kinds of detritus – plastic bags and bottles mainly, but also rotting fruit and vegetables, the occasional tree branches, and one dead dog. I’m reminded of the beach at Malvarrosa on the outskirts of Valencia – the last stop for the No 2 tram from the city where, as I said, I used to live back in 1964, and where my Spanish friends and I played rugby on the sand among canine corpses. Farmers here choose between growing ‘wet’ or ‘dry’ crops. Dry crops include beans and tomatoes, which, by the time I arrived in Bibiclat in early December, had more or less been gathered by teams of hired labourers in brightly coloured clothing, put into sacks, and loaded every evening onto waiting trucks that took them to markets

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in Manila. After beans and tomatoes, it was the turn of onions, which were planted a couple of weeks after my arrival and will be harvested a couple of weeks before I leave three months later, by the same or different teams of workers (often women) and carted off to the same or different markets in Manila by the same or different trucks. Rice is the wet crop, and involves an immense amount of preparatory work, which was going on when I arrived. Farmers first harrow their fields with a disc harrow drawn by carabao water buffalo. I didn’t see them levelling their fields with flat boards in the way that Japanese farmers do (or used to do), but they did have to make the earthen banks between fields, building them up with mud, tamping them as tightly as possible to prevent them from leaking water, and ensuring that some of the banks, at least, were strong and wide enough for them to walk along in order to get to fields further away from the tracks where they had left their motor tricycles under the shade of an acacia or mahogany tree. And all this time, rice seedlings have been growing somewhere, before being moved to one corner of the fields that are being prepared – small patches of vivid green in the midst of all the dark brown earth. Clumps of them are then scattered here and there the night before some of the fields are due to have the rice transplanted by teams of workers in their brightly coloured poppy red, azure blue, sunflower yellow and shamrock green T shirts and shorts. There is no uniformity in these processes, however. While some farmers seem almost ready to transplant their rice seedlings the moment irrigation channels are filled with water, others are still out in their fields with their harrows –

Figure 13.1. Leading a carabao to water. © Brian Moeran.

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some motorised, but many more pulled by the carabao water buffalo that until now have been grazing sedately on what was once dry ground. Some of the buffalo are tethered to wayside trees, waiting to work, and one is led by a rope by its owner to an irrigation ditch into which it sinks gratefully and basks contentedly with just its head and horns above the muddy brown water. As the locals might agree if they knew our proverb about a horse, you can lead a buffalo to water, but you cannot make it drink. Of course, all these preparations need time and money. Kambal tells me that it costs him 3,000 pesos to rent a motorised traktor to harrow one hectare of irrigated field, and a further P1,000 the second and third time he churns up the muddy soil. He also rents workers from an agent in the barangay who charges him P7,700 a hectare for transplanting rice (which probably explains the seemingly haphazard order in which fields are planted when the time comes). Up front expenses like these are only recouped at harvest time three months later, when Kambal reckons on getting about one hundred 55 kg sacks of rice (but maybe only eighty, depending on the harvest). These he last sold at seventeen pesos a kilo. ‘Very cheap!’ he says. He also has to pay in kind for use of a reaper: ten sacks for every hundred filled. Not a bad income from one and a half hours’ work. Still, Kambal makes a profit, all things being equal, of somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 pesos at harvest time twice a year, although these days rice imports from other parts of South East Asia are really depressing prices. Although in some areas of Luzon, there are three rice crops annually, Bibiclat farmers confine

Figure 13.2. Irrigated fields. © Brian Moeran.

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themselves to two. In the winter months, they switch to the cultivation of dry crops. The fertility of the land and the number of crops harvested in a year somehow parallels the fertility of women and the number of children they bear here. The flooded fields make for a very different landscape. Mirror-like, they reflect the clouds and rows of trees on the horizon – a reflection that can enhance a good sunset of red, pink and purple in the sky above. With the heavy monsoon rains in June, dykes between fields often become invisible and it seems as if Bibiclat is surrounded by large lakes. In winter, the flooded fields lighten up the early evening, battling with the dark that quickly envelops the village. Neither JR nor Nana professes to believe in ghosts, but Nana is nervous about my being out in the dark (possibly because, to her mind, it increases the possibility of my being mugged, or run down by an errant motor tricycle?). JR, who is made to accompany me on every walk, seems uneasy, too. Is it that not all the bad spirits have in fact been driven away over the New Year? Irrigation, of course, is an anthropologist’s dream. Valencia had an irrigation system when I lived there, and accompanied Vicente, the father of the Spanish family with whom I stayed, as we took our evening strolls through the orchards and plots of land. But fifty-five years ago I hadn’t yet heard of anthropology (my interest at the time was in my own, as it turned out mistaken, ideas about what I thought constituted comparative linguistics) and so failed to discover how the system worked. That was left to other anthropologists – among them Richard Beardsley, who also studied a rice-growing village in Okayama, Japan. So, what’s so special about irrigation practices? In Bibiclat, it seems, not that much. Rice isn’t transplanted, as it once was in Japan, by virgins singing in unison of the promise of both seedlings and sexual maturity, the hoped-for swelling of the ears of the one and the bellies of the other. However, it is transplanted by teams of men and women – hired workers in the main, but also including relatives – so that irrigation initiates a social occasion, punctuated by conversation, laughter and gossip, as well as back-breaking hard work and the sharing of food and drink. It is this social side of irrigation that is of interest. Back in 1957, the German Sinologist, Karl Wittfogel, then living in the United States, published a book titled Oriental Despotism, in which he argued that the irrigation systems of many Asian societies (and a few elsewhere) required the large-scale organisation of forced labour from the population at large. This, in turn, meant that such societies – in China, India and the Mayan areas of Yucatan – had to develop a centralised bureaucratic administration to build and maintain their

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irrigation systems. In short, they developed what he called ‘hydraulic civilisations’ whose bureaucracies had a ‘total power’ which, following Marx, he called ‘Oriental despotism’. Like all grand theories, this one has had its modifiers and detractors among scholars during the past half century. In particular, it has been pointed out that small-scale irrigation societies have evolved around the world without developing into hydraulic states per se. Wittfogel himself realised this in a cross-cultural study of Egyptian, Japanese and Indian types of irrigation society. It was the ecological, geographical, technological and hydraulic conditions of each that determined whether a system of ‘centralised waterworks’ did, or did not, develop. As I know from my own research there, rice irrigation systems are not centralised in Japan. Rather, they consist mostly of numerous, separated, narrow valleys with stepped fields, rather than the large open expanses found in China or here in Luzon. As a result, no centralised bureaucratic system was developed to control the use of water by rice farmers. In spite of this lack of administrative control, though, they still needed to liaise with one another to ensure that each got access to enough water to irrigate his fields when the ‘rainy season’ came in June. This is not to suggest that irrigation systems in Japan are models of egalitarian harmony. They’re not. Studies, like that by Mitsuru Shimpo, have shown that control of water is crucial to a successful crop and that those who have access to water upstream control its supply and can prevent those downstream (often extended household kin) from irrigating their fields sufficiently during the brief period of the June monsoon. Those with land upstream are usually the oldest resident households in the valley, those downstream the newest. In other words, irrigation systems in Japan still lead to power, but it is power based on length of residence, household and kinship relations, rather than on central bureaucratic administration. It is local power. Another kind of power, found here, was that developed by missionaries after Spain colonised the Philippines in the mid-sixteenth century. They popularised wet rice agriculture by introducing the plough (arado) and the idea of using the carabao as a draft animal. But they had an ulterior motive: to gather larger numbers of people ‘under the church bells’ in order to facilitate the instruction of Filipino natives in Catholicism. This in itself aided the collection of taxes by the colonial government. Irrigation led to control over a population that hitherto had been quite scattered. So, throughout large parts of Luzon, Fernando Zialcita shows us, wet rice agriculture did indeed lead to the spread of a somewhat different – but still bureaucratic and state-like – institution: the Catholic Church.

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And how does all this fit in with irrigation practices here in Bibiclat? The barangay is part of one of the 245 canal irrigation systems operated and maintained by the National Irrigation Administration (NIA). Even though, as a result, the plain around the village is now widely irrigated, Viola says that this wasn’t so in the past. Farmers grew rice, but not in irrigated fields. I suspect that this is only partly true. Irrigation probably did take place, but it may well have been limited to fields near the river running north of Bibiclat. Other fields weren’t irrigated because they were too far from the water source. Irrigation of all fields, including those south of the barangay, became possible when the Philippines Government set up the NIA in the 1950s, and built a series of irrigation channels from rivers and reservoirs to water the plain as a whole. So now there’s a centralised bureaucracy at work. I first spotted that irrigation was under way during a trip back from Cabanatuan when, suddenly, the large ditch beside the main road started rushing with water and neighbouring compounds seemed in danger of being flooded. I followed the water’s course for several kilometres until it turned inland briefly, only to find the car crossing it as we made the right turn towards Bibiclat. A sluice dammed a second watercourse leading towards the fields around the village, but a few days later this had obviously been opened, and the fields became lakes. Who opened them when, and for how long each sluice remains open by whose agreement, I do not know. Almost certainly the captain of each barangay is involved in liaising with neighbouring barangay downstream to ensure that water is evenly distributed, but Tuto says that there are never arguments among farmers about water access. There is plenty of water for everyone. And it’s free. This suggests, although I have no evidence to support the claim, that centralised administration of irrigation water is a benefit for all, rather than for a select few. It’s also difficult to imagine that it is somehow a product of ‘total power’ and that there are some who benefit from that power at the expense of others. Rather, the fact that water is scarce at certain times of the year means that it makes more sense to centralise decisionmaking, rather than have each barangay acting autonomously. Unlike the hydraulic civilisations studied by Wittfogel, people are living in a society that has embraced – at least in principle – democratic institutions of governance. Barangay like Bibiclat thus form an association of water users who have worked out a consensual set of arrangements that is of benefit to everyone. Which is how things should be, but – alas! – rarely are.

14

Rice and Classification People here eat, without fail, at midday or soon after, however big their breakfast has been. Both then, and at their evening meal, they eat a mass of rice, with whatever there is by way of accompanying dishes – usually adobo of some kind, where pork or chicken, occasionally fish, is first marinated (adobar in Spanish means ‘marinade’), then cooked, in vinegar, soy sauce and garlic, together with available inseason vegetables. In Nana’s family, adobo is often accompanied by an anchovy and chilli patis, or paste. Dishes are often a combination of sour and salty tastes. Dipping sauces tend to have a sour base: vinegar with a crushed chilli pepper pod, or slivers of onions with mashed garlic. Nana’s family seems very fond of unripe mangoes which they pick from the tree in the garden and then slice and eat with their main course. This sourness is used to combat fats and oils used in cooking. People think that sourness both reveals and conceals the natural juices found in fish and meat. For the record, I should add that snake, monkey, giant lizard and rat (said to be excellent for the skin) are all eaten here from time to time, if available. These Blessica classifies as ‘exotic foods’. Ideally, food should never be left over once served on the table. No wonder everyone in the family except Tuto gets fat. He’s always working, so he keeps trim. This is generally true of most younger men. It’s their women who become overweight through childbirth and over-eating. Blessica can never refuse an offer of more food – of any kind! Nana has put on several pounds since finishing her job in Hong Kong and coming back home to live in Bibiclat.

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Rice is clearly distinguished from other food. This starts with a difference in the names of the fields in which rice (saka) and vegetables (bukid) are grown. Then, how you talk about rice depends on whether it is cooked or uncooked. Uncooked rice is bigás, and cooked rice kanín. The word for ‘eat’ is kaínin or kaín, and that for ‘food’ or a ‘meal’ pagkaín. This suggests that Tagalog makes a linguistic connection between eating a meal and its main constituent, rice. Several other Asian languages do the same. The Japanese also make a distinction between irrigated tambo rice, and dry hatake vegetable, fields, and both Japanese and Chinese distinguish between uncooked (kome 米 or mi) and cooked (gohan ご飯 or fan) rice. They also use the same word for ‘cooked rice’ and ‘meal’ (gohan or fan). Koreans, too, make the same distinction between cooked (bap) and uncooked (ssal) rice and use the former to refer to a meal or food in general (think about the word bibimbap that you may have eaten in a Korean restaurant nearby). It looks like we’ve got a linguistic form of ‘Oriental despotism’ here, although there are some groups of people in the Philippines who haven’t conformed because they haven’t been wet-rice agriculturalists. Until fairly recently, the Ilongot of Nueva Viscaya and the Hanuoo of Mindoro have made use of swidden (slash and burn) rather than wet rice cultivation as their basic means of obtaining food. This is a form of shifting cultivation that allows the swiddenist to create a temporary garden by burning down a small area of forest. The ashes fertilise the soil and he plants and harvests different crops throughout the year with the help of natural rain water, cutting tools and planting sticks. Because the soil isn’t irrigated, it loses its fertility quickly, which is why farmers have to move around and cultivate their gardens in different parts of the forest, before finally coming back a decade or more later to their original patch of land. I guess our European language equivalent to using the word ‘rice’ for a meal would be calling a meal ‘potatoes’ in Ireland, or ‘bread’ in France, Spain or Greece. Italians, of course, call their appetisers antipasti and their use of pasta itself, perhaps, comes closest among European languages to signifying a meal. In the English language, we also like to distinguish between the living and the dead – and so between Anglo-Saxon and Norman French words – when we talk about meat. Cows, calves, pigs, sheep and deer are live animals which produce beef, veal, pork, mutton and venison when they’re dead. For some reason, it’s not the same with birds or fish. Chicken, pheasant, turkey, and so on remain the same whether alive (where they can be counted) or itemised on restaurant

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menus (where they’re invariable singular) and eaten – with or without ‘relish’. So, too, with trout, salmon, cod, hake and other fish. In Tagalog, life is much simpler. A pig (baboy) is a pig whether alive or dead. So, too, with trout (trutsa) and cod (bakalaw). Who eats – and who cooks – what, and when and where, is intriguing, and there are all sorts of unspoken rules governing what and how we eat and drink. Many years ago, the anthropologist Mary Douglas made a distinction between two food categories – drinks and meals – each of which, she said, is guided by different rules about what is consumed by whom, as well as by frames of behaviour (think of the differences between a cocktail party, an invitation to dinner at somebody’s home, and a formal banquet, for example). So far as I can judge, this kind of distinction has two ramifications here in Bibiclat. First, where a meal takes place differs, depending on participants. Close family members eat together indoors, regardless of the weather. When a wider circle of family members (as on New Year’s Eve), friends (as when Nana’s elementary school classmates came round to discuss a thirty-fifth year reunion), and acquaintances (an impromptu party for our painters and others working on the house) is involved, the meal always takes place outside. This spatial distinction neatly marks a social distinction between insiders and outsiders in the context of the family unit – a distinction that would have made Erving Goffman proud for the way it supports his sociological analysis of frames of behaviour. This analysis has further ramifications. I’ve noticed here that the rice and adobo kind of meal that I eat every day with Nana and whichever of her family members is present is not usually offered when a wider circle of friends and acquaintances is involved. Instead, food is cooked outside on a barbecue and offered to guests. This is made possible because meals like this are intermingled with a lot of drinking, and the food is designed to complement alcoholic consumption. Different occasions demand different kinds of food and drink (which, in family meals, is mostly confined to water). So, we can say that every meal lays bare basic distinctions between groups of people, on the one hand, and between food and drink categories, on the other: water is to boiled adobo as alcohol is to barbecued meats. There is assimilation here between the two parts of this equation: water is used to boil food, and alcohol, like meat, can be set alight by fire and used to flavour food. This places us firmly in the famous ‘culinary triangle’ outlined by the French structural anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argued that boiling meat (or fish) is a preferred way of cooking among

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women and is served to small closed groups like family members. It is, as he calls it, an ‘endo-cuisine’. Roasting meat, on the other hand, is an ‘exo-cuisine’ – a form of cooking that tends to be done by men and is customarily offered to guests. From this, in the context of rice, I’m led to quote and adapt the entry on boiling (Bouilli) in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia: ‘Boiled meat is to other kinds of dishes, as rice (bread in the original) is to other kinds of nourishment’. There is an additional gender distinction here. Later on I’m going to write about the cockfight in the Philippines. What we’ll find out is that women rarely visit cockfights and that they’re excluded from rearing fighting cocks, which is exclusively a male preserve (as one might expect from the English word ‘cock’). They are, however, very much involved in the preparation and cooking of chicken for domestic consumption. So male humans are in charge of live male roosters, and females of dead female chickens. The third apex of the culinary triangle – somewhere between elaborated ‘nature’ and unelaborated ‘culture’ – is smoking meat or other foods. However, this seems to be quite limited here. Some very small fish (tuyó and dilís) are smoked, and there’s a smoked sausage that people eat called longganisa (longaniza in Spanish and quite close to a chorizo in taste) but that seems to be about it. These are eaten at family meals. There is, though, one kind of meal that doesn’t fit my neat distinction between inside(rs) and outside(rs), and that’s the ‘boodle fight’. It seems that there’s nothing Nana’s family and friends like better than, on very special festive occasions, laying out large banana leaves on a long table outdoors, and covering them with lines of rice, meat and vegetables. With much chatter and laughter, they stand shoulder to shoulder around the table and help themselves to the laid-out food which they eat with their hands (kamayan). As I said, this seems to contradict my earlier distinction between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ meals in that it mixes both boiled and roasted meats and vegetables, together with rice. This may be because this kind of shared meal somehow levels out family, friend and acquaintance distinctions, although it would seem that this new, shared social status needs to be ‘fought’ for and over by participants (who eat outside, not inside, the house). It may be the absence of alcohol that enables this kind of betwixt-and-between social grouping. ‘Boodle fight’, though, is a strange phrase. Apparently, it was first used in the Philippine Military Academy for an eating party, but has since been adopted in wider society. ‘Boodle’ itself is said to refer to illicit spoils of some kind and may come from the Dutch boedel. It may

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also be related to ‘kit and caboodle’. This may explain its connection to American army slang for contraband sweets (cake, candy and ice cream), though why it should be used to refer to a Filipino’s type of meal I’ve no idea. One thing I’ve been struck by during my stay here is the lack of what I would regard as ‘decent’ restaurants in the country, as well as their lack of variety. When you drive around, all you see are large signs for cheap restaurant chain outlets like Jollibee, Chowking, Max’s and the ubiquitous Pizza Hut and McDonald’s. It’s really quite hard to find much else until you go into a shopping mall, where you come across other popular chains – Shakey’s Pizza, Kuya J, Mangan, Tokyo Tokyo and (for coffee) Starbucks. You hardly come across any independently run restaurants and cafés in cities outside Manila. So eating out becomes very much ‘more of the same’, and that sameness is very much at the popular end of any culinary hierarchy that exists in the Philippines, with a diet that is higher in total fat, saturated fat and cholesterol than other Asian diets. The fact that food is almost invariably placed on the table all at once, whether at home or in restaurants (a bit like a Scandinavian smögåsbord), reinforces its popular nature. As Jack Goody has pointed out, higher forms of cooking (what, in Europe, we’d probably refer to as haute cuisine) usually involve serving food in a series of courses. Filipino food, in this respect, would be defined by Europeans as definitely at the lower end of cooking forms. It isn’t complex. It doesn’t make use of exotic ingredients, in the way that French and other forms of European cooking use, for example, spices from far off lands to add taste to their fish, meat, grains and vegetables. But it has borrowed ingredients and dishes from Hokkien China: Nana’s favourite stir-fried pancit canton noodles, for example, and lumpia spring rolls. There are also Malay and Indonesian, as well as colonial Spanish, influences. All of this sort of ties in with the what I wrote about irrigation and Oriental despotism. Higher forms of cooking reflect social stratification, where the ruling class makes use of writing for administrative, economic and literary purposes. These higher forms tend to consist of ‘recipes’ that are written and handed down. They also rely on specialists to come up with new dishes that make use of regional food eaten by the peasantry, but combine in them what is consumed by exoticised foreigners. So haute cuisine is linked to a particular kind of hierarchy based on a particular kind of food production system. This suggests a hypothesis: if there had been a centralised bureaucratic mode of rice production in the Philippines,

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there might well have developed with its written administration a written form of haute cuisine. But there wasn’t, so there isn’t. There’s something else about rice which takes me onto a different topic much loved by anthropologists back in the 1960s and 1970s: left/ right symbolism. Given the chance, people here will use their hands, their right hands, to eat their rice – whatever kind of meal they’re participating in. This – together with a bit of meat or vegetable – they dexterously squeeze between their fingers and put into their mouths, before chewing appreciatively. Using a spoon and fork (knives are rarely, if ever, put on the table) doesn’t seem to give my newly acquired relatives and friends that much satisfaction. So what’s so special about this? First, the way in which people eat here doesn’t seem to be all that different from how people used to eat in medieval Europe. Up until the sixteenth century, people in England ate with their fingers, taking food from a common dish and sometimes drinking from a single cup. Then the individual spoon, knife and goblet came into common usage, as eating became more privatised. Intriguingly, this was accompanied by a similar change in sleeping arrangements. Whereas in previous centuries people had often shared the same bed, now they started to sleep in separate rooms. I see a parallel here in Bibiclat, where Nana’s family members not only take their food from a single dish, but will happily share a bed or sofa when staying in the house. Indeed, when I first arrived in the Philippines and spent a couple of nights in a fairly luxurious hotel in

Figure 14.1. Viola, Telay, Blessica, Nana and Gianna share a hotel bed. © Brian Moeran.

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Manila before driving to Bibiclat, the first thing that happened was that two of Nana’s sisters and two of her nieces arrived to examine our room, and all lay down together with Nana under the bedclothes in the hotel’s rather large bed. (They left before I was allowed to get in.) Second, eating food in one’s fingers brings in distinctions in usage of the left and right hand. Generally speaking, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out, we tend to equate right with ‘good’, and left with ‘bad’. We associate law and order (rectitude; civil, human and other rights), correctness (uprightness), skill (dexterity), and so on with ‘right’, and rebellion, wickedness (sinister), improper manners (gauche), with left. The political spectrum, of course, is divided into ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings – something that originated in France, where the left was seen as ‘the party of movement’, and the right as ‘the party of order’. Left symbolises equality, and right hierarchy. So, anyone who wants equality will almost certainly have to upend the existing order first. As the French scholar, Robert Hertz, commented more than 100 years ago, ‘right is the symbol and model of all aristocracies, the left hand of all plebeians’. Social order is based on inequality. Generally speaking, we classify the world around us in terms of our spatial orientation, so that distinctions between right and left, up and down (e.g. upper versus lower classes), and in and out (e.g. insider versus outsider) parallel and reinforce the social order, mainly in terms of good and bad. What’s good is ‘up’ (as in ‘up and coming’ or ‘upwardly mobile’); what’s bad is ‘down’ (as in ‘down-and-outs’ or ‘beneath one’s dignity’). One fashion can be ‘in’ and therefore good, another ‘outré’ and not worth consideration. An ‘insider’ view is more authentic, and thus better, than one from the outside. To be ‘right’ is to be good; left, by implication, not so. In some societies, right is seen to be ‘sacred’, left ‘profane’. And in the Philippines? Tuto’s rooster, like most roosters in Bibiclat, has its left leg fastened by a cord lasso (it is to this left leg that a knife or gaff will be attached in a fight), leaving it to scratch around in the earth for food with its right leg. So here, too, death is associated with left, and life with right. Similarly, people here eat with their right hands, unless they are left-handed, when – unlike in India, the Middle East and throughout Africa, for example – it’s acceptable to use one’s left hand. This is because left-handed people use their right hands to wipe their hind quarters, while right-handed people use their left. It is, therefore, two actions – rather than one single usage of the hand – which determines what is or is not acceptable. A left-handed person wiping his bum and eating with his left would be regarded as a bit

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yucky. But it doesn’t become an issue of pollution or defilement in the way it does in Indian caste society. Although it’s the left leg of a rooster that will inflict death in a cockfight (sabong), left doesn’t generally have the ‘sinister’ connotations it has in many European languages. When I lived in Spain back in 1964, for instance, older women used to cross themselves when they saw me writing with my left hand. The worst I’ve come across so far in Tagalog is the comment that left (kaliwá) is used to refer to a married man or woman who takes a lover (nangabét) or mistress (kabét). People say that s/he has ‘moved left’ (nangaliwá). ‘Right’ (kánan) strikes me as being less important here than diretso, an extremely common word in Tagalog meaning ‘straight’, but which clearly comes from Spanish derecho meaning both ‘straight’ and ‘right’. This suggests that being right is being straight, and vice versa. For example, matuwid means having a ‘straight’ or ‘right’ vision and refers to ‘right-wing’ politics. The opposite is baluktot, or ‘sinuous’ – Nana uses one hand to indicate a snake-like ‘weaving in and out’ – for left-wing sympathisers. Does this then suggest that the primary symbolic code of orientation isn’t an opposition between left and right so much as one between straight and crooked (which, of course, is also very important in English and other Indo-European languages – as in ‘straight-laced’, ‘round the bend’, ‘a curve ball’ and so on)? Is there a ‘grain of truth’ in these scattered musings on rice, or am I simply going ‘against the grain’ of generally accepted norms? Something else has underpinned this discussion of rice and classification: the fact that food is in large part shared in Nana’s family. This isn’t surprising. Food is life-giving, symbolic of hearth and home, and is, therefore, more readily shared than – say – farming equipment or clothing (although these are loaned and borrowed, too, from time to time). Tuto often times his visits to his younger sister’s house to coincide with dinner. If one of Nana’s friends happens to be visiting, she’s invariably invited to eat with us; as is Blessica’s childhood friend, Christian, who comes in from the garden where the two of them have been engaged in earnest and seemingly endless conversations. Blessica herself, together with Nana, prepares meals twice a day for the painters at work decorating the inside and outside of the house. Commensality is a great promoter of solidarity and community. The thing about sharing food is that there’s no expectation of a direct or equivalent return. This is rather different from English middle-class dinner parties, where those who don’t reciprocate are in due course not invited to dinner again (and where guests are expected to bring a

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bottle of wine or prepared dish in direct reciprocal exchange for food received). In Bibiclat, people don’t expect this kind of equivalence. Food is a barometer of social relations, used to sustain sociality. The fact that neither Christian nor Malou has invited Nana and myself to eat with them at their homes isn’t an issue. Nana knows that they’ll return her ‘gift’ in other ways when an opportunity or need arises (as it occasionally does when she asks Malou to dress a wound when I manage to trip over and scrape a large amount of skin off my knee, or her husband, Kambal, to drive us somewhere or other). In short, like others families around us, we’re involved in a system of what Marshall Sahlins has called generalised reciprocity, where altruism prevails and there’s no necessary obligation on those who have shared meals with us to return an equivalent favour. In her own selflessness and feeling of indebtedness to those around her, Nana epitomises a comment made by the Canadian French anthropologist, Jacques Godbout: ‘a successful family relationship is one where everyone thinks they receive more than they give, where everyone considers themselves indebted vis-à-vis the other, rather than feeling that the other is indebted to them’. In my experience, here as elsewhere, it’s women who are most deeply involved in giving. Local men tend to be clumsy and embarrassed when it comes to giving and sharing. It’s probably fair to say that they wouldn’t really know how to behave if there weren’t any women around to guide them. Gender exploitation? Perhaps, but in a way, by being at the heart of the gift in the domestic sphere, women are the focus of resistance to the invasion of a marketplace that doesn’t believe in unselfish sharing and hospitality. One could go further and suggest that women are themselves exploiters of capitalist practices, which they manipulate through the gift to their own ends. Sharing food is a kind of generalised exchange that is in many ways separate from other spheres of more balanced exchange involving material goods, labour and wealth (of the kind Kambal mentioned when talking about rice cultivation). Food often doesn’t move in the realm of money. The other evening, for example, while I was out on one of my walks in the fields, a group of workers called out to me and gave me a large bag of tomatoes that they were picking. They had no thought of exchange (the ‘pure gift’). So yes, a meal is the customary return for labour solicited for domestic tasks, but food isn’t measurable in the same way as, for example, borrowing a tractor to plough one’s rice fields or working as a day labourer to help with transplanting rice. Hospitality is good relations.

15

Going for a Walk I decide to go for a walk. Nana is out practising her driving with JR, so I put on my socks and go out of the house to put on my walking shoes. But there’s sudden consternation from within. The three nieces who’ve been watching a Netflix cartoon rush out to restrain me. ‘You can’t go out alone, Unkél’, they cry, echoing their aunt’s principled response whenever I try to go out for a walk on my own. Nana seems convinced that I will, at best, be robbed; at worst, stabbed with a knife or farming implement and left to die. I’m not convinced, even though – it’s true, and I’ll come back to it later – her brother-inlaw was shot and murdered in his field over a year ago, apparently by one of Duterte’s so called ‘death squads’. ‘Yes, I can’, I respond. ‘It’s fine. You carry on watching Netflix’. ‘No. We come with you’. They slip on their flip-flops and start towards the gate, only to exclaim, ‘But, Un-kél, it’s raining’. An umbrella appears magically from nowhere. ‘Are you sure?’ I ask doubtfully. ‘Yes. You can’t walk in the rain’, says Gianna. ‘It will fall on your head and you’ll catch cold’. How can one argue with such impeccable logic?! And it really has started to pour down (only the second time I have experienced rain during my stay in Bibiclat), so I dutifully go back inside and read a book. But the next day I do manage to escape. Nana has gone off with JR, Gianna, and who knows who else, to Aliaga to buy food for tonight. Her sisters, Blessica and Viola, are around, but I manage to get out of

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the house unseen – or so I think, until Viola suddenly appears round the corner nonchalantly sweeping the astro-turf with a long handled brush. ‘Where you go?’ she asks. ‘For a walk’, I reply. ‘Walk? Where?’ ‘Tumana’, I say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the fields. ‘But rain’, she says. ‘No, it’s not. At least, not yet’. ‘Maybe no. But rain come’. Nevertheless, I open the gate to the compound and make my escape, expecting to hear the slapping of bare feet in flip flops as one offspring or another is despatched to accompany me. But all is quiet behind and I wend my way left and right through a couple of narrow streets, greeting the children who are getting to know me by now and who come running up to me to give high fives. At the crossroads I’m overtaken by Mandel on his 125cc Honda bike. Where am I going? For a walk? But it’ll rain. Never mind, I smile, I won’t die. He turns his bike round suddenly, almost throwing his

Figure 15.1. Out in the tumana, with acacia tree. © Brian Moeran.

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pillion passenger off balance, and speeds off in the direction from which I’ve come. I carry on out of the village and into the fields which are now being irrigated. Farmers are walking shin-deep in muddy water ploughing the earth, preparing the fields for the planting of the beds of rice seedlings that form a vivid green square in one corner of the irrigated fields. Tricycles pass by, and their half dozen brightly-dressed occupants call out greetings like ‘Hey, man!’ and ‘Hey friend!’ and wave happily. It’s hard to imagine Nana’s fear of my being mugged or worse happening here. Farmers I pass usually smile or quickly jerk their heads up with eyebrows raised in greeting. They don’t say much, other than the occasional ‘Kanó!’ (Americano) or ‘Hey, Joe!’ The latter clearly has something to do with American GIs, but – as Agapito once put it – ‘it is American with love’. For the first time since I came to the Philippines four weeks ago, I find myself enjoying the presence of my own company and, as I always do when out walking (along the water course above Pokfulam to go to the University of Hong Kong back in the 1990s; later, in the forest around our house in southern Sweden; then, up in the hills above Mui Wo on Lantau Island; and, nowadays, on the great expanse of Dartmoor), try to make sense of the world in which I find myself. Once or twice I pause for a drink of water, sitting down on a tree stump, concrete block, or farm vehicle parked by the path, and enjoy the quiet scenes of water buffalo, the white egrets that – inevitably, it seems – accompany them (both here and in Hong Kong), the swaying fronds of banana plants, acacia trees, and the occasional eery clacking of giant clumps of bamboo. This peace is abruptly shattered by Louis Armstrong singing ‘What a wonderful world!’ I answer my mobile phone and listen to the worried voice of Nana. ‘Where are you? We’re looking for you. We’ve been everywhere’. She names places I’ve never heard of. I reassure her that I’m fine, just taking a walk, and on my way home. ‘But where?’ She asks again, insistently. I tell her and she rings off as abruptly as she called. Five minutes later, a motorbike appears with two of her nephews on it – JR and Sherwin. They’ve come to ‘rescue’ Unkél from danger, although JR is chuckling with laughter at my having outwitted Nana and escaped. His younger brother, Sherwin, is left to accompany me home – a thirty-minute stroll during which his eyes are glued to his mobile phone, determined – it seems – to maintain the Filipino average Internet usage of ten hours and six minutes a day. As a result, he falls

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behind and, every hundred metres or so, has to run in his flip-flops to catch up with me. And so it goes on until we come in sight of the village, at which point Nana herself appears, riding pillion behind JR on his motorbike, to make sure that I really haven’t been beaten up by bandits. Seeing that I am, indeed, alive and well, she orders JR to turn round, and together they speed off back home, with Nana giving me a look of either disgust at my having outwitted her, or annoyance that her prediction wasn’t fulfilled! As one of her older sisters, Blessica, later said: ‘No terrorists here. She like to bossing’. But am I being stupid when ignoring Nana’s concerns? After all, she has lived in Bibiclat most of her life and so knows the place far better than I ever will. Am I perhaps being a bit ‘cavalier’? Perhaps, although in his book on a remote part of the Philippines, Playing with Water, James Hamilton-Paterson notes that the locals were aghast when he said he was going to live alone on a deserted island. ‘Ruffians come here’, one commented darkly. ‘All sort of criminals… They may land one night, creep up, and cut your throat’. One man I met on one of my walks a few weeks later asked if I was alone – something that, given the empty expanse of rice fields around us, must have been glaringly obvious. When I replied in the affirmative, adding that I didn’t think anyone was going to kill me here in Bibiclat, he quickly agreed. ‘Philippine people here are good. Friendly’. It was something he himself proved over time, as we began to meet occasionally and developed an acquaintanceship. Another evening, a very drunk man weaved to a somewhat uncertain halt on his bicycle in front of me and cried out: ‘Where you go? Single, you?’ It transpired that this had nothing to do with my marital state, but, once again, to the fact that I was walking on my own out in the fields. All of which leads to the conclusion that nobody should be allowed to go around alone, unprotected by family or friends. It’s a matter of propriety and, in the case of foreigners perhaps, a sense of national pride to ensure that nothing out of the way happens to them.

16

A Pillow Tree Following on from the last incident, JR has now been ordered to accompany me wherever I go. This allows me to learn some words and very basic phrases in Tagalog, but it’s a start. My phrase book has somehow got lost in the upheaval caused by the arrival of the team of painters in the house. One evening, JR and I find a new road to take on our walk – he wasn’t brought up in Bibiclat and so is almost as much a stranger here as I am – and we end up being followed curiously by seventeen kids who walk or skip along beside us in fearful silence. A tall foreigner is a curiosity, yes, but also someone to be afraid of. I eventually manage to break the ice by giving one a high five, whereupon one after another they come up – one or two still rather nervously – to give me high fives. I then suddenly turn round as they follow us and make a scary enough noise to have them jump with fright and then, realising I’m only joking, break out into laughter. Before we’re finished, I manage to elicit squeals of laughter from three or four after tickling them under the armpits. One by one they take my hand and raise it to their foreheads in blessing – all seventeen of them. On our way back, JR suddenly stops and points in the air above us: ‘Pillow tree!’ he exclaims. I look up at the branches of a roadside tree. ‘Pillow?’ I repeat, confused. ‘Yes. Bulak. Cotton’, he clarifies. ‘Ah! In those?’ I point to pods hanging, very much like fluffy IKEA pillows, from the tree’s branches.

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JR nods. ‘Make pillows’. Simple enough logic? Or a kind of contagious magic? A tree with cotton pods must be able to make IKEA pillows.

Figure 16.1. Blessing sought and given at the Mud Festival. © Brian Moeran.

17

Actually I first came across Jason, a builder who lives near Visoria and who was introduced to Nana through her older sister, Teté, a year ago when Nana came back to Bibiclat for her annual two-week holiday while working as a domestic helper in Hong Kong. It was New Year’s Eve and people had been coming and going all day – primarily to welcome Nana back home, and to eat and drink what was offered them by way of hospitality while they were at it. I had sat outside in the ‘garden’ most of the time, left to my own devices. A few people had come over to say ‘hello’, but not much more. They seemed to have virtually no English and, anyway, it was Nana they wanted to see after yet another year of her working abroad. As I briefly mentioned earlier, at some point in the middle of the evening, a jovial man in his mid- to late forties sat down beside me and began to talk to me in English. Like everyone else – it was, after all, New Year’s Eve – he had been drinking. As a result, he had lost a lot of his inhibitions about speaking a foreign language and ‘getting a nosebleed’ when talking English to me (a standing joke among Filipinos when they speak English to a foreigner). I don’t remember much of what we talked about – our conversation consisted of the usual questions of where I came from, what kind of work we both did, where he lived, how I’d met Nana, and so on. But, perhaps because he was feeling quite loquacious, Jason prefaced almost every one of his opening sentences with the word ‘actually’. This struck everyone as quite amusing, especially since Jason unabashedly spoke in quite a loud voice, and got his meaning across in spite of a happy disregard for the rules of English grammar. So, by

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the time he turned up a couple of days later to discuss a work project with Nana, we had started to refer to him as ‘Actually’. Now, a year later, Actually is back finishing off some more jobs on the house – not always to Nana’s satisfaction, but that’s not the point here. I like Jason because he’s one of a very small handful of people here who really does his best to communicate in English with me, with phrases like ‘I’ll explain a little of you’, ‘Sir, I put on my spyglass. Then I can see’, and, when expressing relief, ‘Thanks God’. He always speaks quite slowly, still in a rather loud voice, which elicits many smiles of amusement, touched with admiration, from his fellow workers. But he tries his best to get his meaning across and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s what matters. As a result, we have had some wonderfully mad conversations. One I quickly managed to record went like this: ‘Sir! Sir Brian!’ Actually cried loudly when he saw me sitting outside one afternoon with my computer, while the painters were working nearby on the outside walls of the house. ‘You cannot sit there. The scar folding!’ He gestured wildly upwards to the scaffolding. Figure 17.1. Actually. © Brian Moeran.

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‘What about it?’ ‘It come down on you. And you do not write your will with me in it yet’, he laughed, before adding, with echoes of Hercule Poirot’s phraseology, ‘Please to sit elsewhere. Yes’. I moved my chair a few feet to one side until he was satisfied that I wasn’t about to be killed. Then he continued. ‘Upstairs I put in the pan and the lightning, but they together. Yes. So I try to separate them, but pull the string both together. I try to change the wall, you know? You want to see now? Sir Brian, I will show you the difference between the tumbler switch and the remains of the lightning. Yes’. Not entirely sure what he was talking about, but sensing that this was too good an opportunity to be missed, I closed my computer and stood up to go inside. But Actually wasn’t ready to follow me yet. ‘Sir Brian, you must wait’. He gestured towards a tray of drinks and buns that Blessica had just brought out for the workers’ mid-afternoon snack. ‘It is my teatime’, he said proudly at having remembered the phrase, before adding, as though agreeing with what he’d said, ‘Yes’. ‘Never mind’, I said, ‘have your tea later’. ‘No, no. My workers’ stomachs have hole in them’. Another morning, I found Actually with a young lad up on the roof terrace, tape measure in hand, where he was in the process of putting up a shelter over part of the open space to provide some shade, and putting in electricity for Nana’s projected rooftop parties. He seemed surprised to see me, so I asked him what he was doing. ‘Your housewife ask me to make roof for sun’. He explained in his usual slow and measured English, at the same time pointing to various bits of cut and welded steel lying about on the terrace. Then he added: ‘Sir Brian, if you want house in your country, call me. I come. Yes’. I thanked him, but had to explain the problem with obtaining a visa of any kind to visit England. Even Nana as my wife wasn’t allowed to stay for more than six months unless, or until, she passed an English test. If she wanted to stay more than two and a half years, she’d have to pass a ‘culture’ test which even I didn’t know half the answers to. Actually was unfazed by this explanation. ‘Maybe, Sir Brian, you want to build somewhere in the Pilippine country. Yes? You call me. Yes’. Again, his last affirmative was more like an agreement with how he expressed himself in English than with the content of what was said. ‘How about Pantabangan?’ I asked, mentioning a reservoir up in the hills that we had just visited and liked very much. I’d finally found

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somewhere that was cool, had beautiful low mountain range views, and was relatively unpopulated. ‘Oh yes! Sir Brian!’ cried Actually enthusiastically. ‘I go many times with friend. Yes. Maybe five times’. He put out all the fingers of his left hand. ‘Very nice place. Yes. And in the afternoon, many peesh’. ‘Peesh?’ ‘Yes, peesh!’ he exclaimed loudly. ‘Not peesh like in sea. But other peesh’. ‘Ah! Fish!’ I exclaimed equally loudly in relief at having understood, before asking: ‘Fresh water fish?’ ‘Yes, sir. Fu-resh water peesh’. He gave me a look of triumph at mastering this difficult phrase. (Or as Blessica wittily put it when she heard the story: ‘It give him peesh of mind!’) ‘And, Sir Brian’, he continued, ‘If you don’t mind me ask. How old you are?’ ‘Seventy-five next week’, I replied. ‘Oh! Happy birthday in advance week’, he smiled happily. ‘I give you present. What do you like? Begetables? Sir, I give you begetables’. ‘Thank you, Jason. I think, maybe, I’d prefer a new house’. He clapped his hands even more happily. ‘Yes, Sir. I give you birthday present bill of new house in Pantabangan. Yes’. As we started to go downstairs from the roof, he continued: ‘And sir, if you need to go a place, call me. I will be a guide of you’. On yet another occasion, when Actually and I were talking about how best to secure an iron grid to the outside wall of the house, he noticed Nana listening and said: ‘I repair you say English in Tagalog for your housewife. Yes’. And why not? After a lot of strange conversations with Actually and other people whose English isn’t usually very good, to say the least, my own grammar and pronunciation probably do need repairing. It also transpired that Actually, who also lives in Visoria, has had to report to Teté every evening on the way home with his co-workers, to tell her how far he’s got with the work on Nana’s car port and roof. What one family member gets up to is clearly the business of many others. I was reminded of this once again this morning when the whole house started to vibrate yet again with the sound of hammering on concrete, and I suggested at breakfast that we go out.

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‘Let’s go to Pantabangan Dam again’, said Nana. ‘We can take Gianna and Telay with us. They’re here from Manila and have never been there’. An hour later, Teté arrived with Sherwin. Clearly, it was going to be another massive family outing. I wasn’t sure if Blessica was included, too, or not. But she, JR and Nana were soon cooking furiously. The workers had to be fed mid-morning, at lunch time, and in the afternoon. It looked like they were preparing everything then so that Blessica could join us. In which case the Xpander – a bit like a Japanese drunk who has imbibed more than the acceptable seven gō bottles of sake – would be ‘one over the seven’ passenger limit. Hopefully, it would be less erratic in its progress along the road. In the event, it was Teté who stayed behind. In the car her sisters joked that she fancied Actually, whose wife had left him many years back, and that she was probably going to spend the day with him. Instead Blessica, who had never been to Pantabangan, came with us as the seventh passenger. The Xpander was saved from metaphorical inebriation! There is, though, a bit more to this joke than meets the eye when it comes to Actually’s reporting to Teté on his way home every evening. His wife – described by others as a ‘nagger’ – left him early on during their marriage with three children whom he proceeded to bring up by himself (presumably with the help of his mother and one or two other relatives). Now that they’re grown up and have left home, he has a bit more time to himself. A lot of it he seems to spend in the company of Teté who is, of course, a widow following her husband Felix’s death. At first Nana said they were just friends, but over the course of my stay it’s become clear to us both (as well as to others) that a bit more than a friendship is developing between them. By mid-March she was openly cuddling, and being cuddled by, Actually as they sat outside sharing a couple of beers. According to the Catholic Church, there’s no divorce here in the Philippines, but I can’t help wondering if I’m about to gain a new, unofficial relative in law. Actually, I’d rather enjoy that…

18

Spirits Ylang-ylang, with its pure white petals and central yellow stamen, has a beautifully sweet, ‘tropical flower’ smell and is used in the making of perfumes. But it’s also the flower of death. There was – still is – an ylang-ylang tree behind the house where Nana was born and brought up (the one she inherited, but passed on to her two brothers), and she recalls an incident very early on in her life when, for some reason, the neighbour living behind their compound called in a medium. After saying some initial prayers, this espiritista went into a trance and began making very high-pitched sounds as a spirit spoke through her. It transpired that this voice belonged to a dwarf or hobgoblin (dwende [Spanish duende]) who was living in the ylang-ylang tree nearby, and that – together with a giant (kapré) with whom it shared its abode – it needed placating. At one point during the séance, Nana’s father, Agapito, turned to his youngest daughter and whispered: ‘Don’t be afraid! She’s talking to herself’. In the past – or, as Nana puts it, long, long ago – Filipinos were extremely fearful of supernatural beings of one sort or another, particularly of the dangerous aswang, which were believed to eat human flesh and internal organs, and generally to cause illness. These were very much included among the general category of evil spirits called maligno. Others, known as engkanto (encanto), or ‘enchanted’, were not harmful. One became aware of spirits by seeing them, of course, but also by hearing their voices or various kinds of untoward sounds. Bamboo groves were thought to be inhabited by the spirits of the dead (marukpuk) and I have to say that I myself have found the sudden clatter of bamboo stems in the wind, as though someone was

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beating them with a stick, quite frightening when out on one of my walks at dusk. Spirits could also make themselves known through touch and smell. One might feel the cold and lifeless touch of an apparition at night, accompanied by the smell of burning incense. Or one might smell the odour of fried onions and garlic during daytime as the spirits cooked their food in a tree; or even of soap when they washed themselves at noon. Howsoever they make themselves known to human beings, spirits should be placated, rather than explicitly expelled (as they often are elsewhere). As far as many Filipinos are concerned, the world isn’t perceived in terms of distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, where ‘we’ do our utmost to rule over ‘them’. Rather, it’s a place where human beings interact with, and where necessary appease, other living beings and objects in their environment. There’s an understanding that supernatural and material worlds are based on reciprocity and that they involve endless cycles of ‘give and take’. By working the fields, you give life to the earth, which itself returns this gift with food; by conceiving and bringing up children, you give them life, which they then return by looking after you in your old age. When you die, you, too, may become a supernatural being, so treat them well in the meantime. Life in Bibiclat is driven by a sense of mutuality. What the story about the dwarf, the giant and the ylang-ylang tree also reminds us is that spirit mediums have been practising healing among indigenous peoples in the Philippines since time immemorial. Although dented, perhaps, by Spanish colonisation from the midsixteenth century and ensuing Catholicism, Spiritism and Spiritualism are said to be very much alive and well here – in particular in this part of Luzon. As an institution, the Spiritualist Church came into being during the Spanish and American Wars between 1898 and 1902. This isn’t surprising. The emergence of a set of religious beliefs like this, or even of an entirely new religious sect, often occurs during heightened political tensions brought on by outside forces. So many new sects formed in Japan following the end of the country’s isolation in 1868, and again after defeat in world War II, that these periods of the country’s history have been dubbed ‘the rush hour of the gods’. Spiritism? Spiritualism? Am I confusing two separate practices? Possibly, for although distinctions are made between the two, they aren’t always entirely clear. Followers of Spiritism believe in reincarnation, while spiritualists don’t. Spiritism is said to be more a philosophy concerned with the relationship between incorporeal beings, or spirits, and human beings than it is a religious movement

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per se. True, it has centres, societies, federations and a union (known formally as the Union Espiritista Cristiana de Filipinas), rather than churches, but it bases its teachings on the Holy Bible and messages from divine spirits, and has also been called a religious organisation which uses human mediums to communicate with spirits for moral and spiritual guidance. For its part, Spiritualism is a religious movement based on the belief that the spirits of the dead exist. These have both the ability and inclination to communicate with the living. It also suggests that these spirits are more advanced than humans and so are capable of providing useful knowledge through their communications with humans about moral and ethical issues, including the nature of God. This third belief leads to further confusion, since the term ‘spirit’, as used by Spiritualists in the USA and UK, is often perceived by Filipinos to be the ‘Holy Spirit’ (although I haven’t heard this said by the people I talk to). The earliest Spiritualist Church in the Philippines was set up in San Fabian, Pangasinan, not too far from here. The even closer province of Tarlac is said to have 100 Spiritualist centres scattered around the region, serving a population of approximately one million people. It would seem, though, that Spiritualism is dying out as an institutionalised religious sect, for it’s rare to find anyone in a church’s congregation under the age of fifty-five. The same seems to apply to less formal kinds of medium, like the espiritista who said the dwarf in Agapito’s ylang-ylang tree needed placating. As Nana puts it: ‘There are lots of tales passed down from parents to their children and now to their grandchildren, but the younger generation doesn’t care and doesn’t believe in spirits or ghosts. Old people, though, have plenty of tales to tell’. They’re not the only ones, as conversation over dinner on two successive evenings quickly reveals. One thing Nana remembers about her childhood – although whether it’s a story told or event witnessed, she herself isn’t sure – is how a medium (who can be either male or female) would burn a candle and let its wax drip into a bowl of water. There it would cool and form a shape which the espiritista would then interpret as some kind of ‘spirit’ – a scorpion is the shape mentioned by Nana and JR. (Echoes, here, of old women telling one’s fortune from the dregs of a morning cup of Greek – or Turkish – coffee.) To placate it, you had to wrap the melted wax form up in paper and place it under your pillow for three nights. Then the spirit wouldn’t bother you again. JR recalls how, a few years back, his younger brother Ace was on his way to Tarlac to go ‘carolling’ with some friends before Christmas,

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when he felt a sudden pulling of his right arm. This was so strong that he lost control of his motorbike and almost crashed. Once he’d stopped, though, everything was OK and he was able to continue his journey without further mishap. He’s no idea, though, who, or what, this particular spirit might have been. But a spirit it most certainly was. JR then adds that his other younger brother, Sherwin, also saw a ghost once. He was still a very small child, aged only three at the time. One night he was asleep in bed with JR, when he suddenly sat up calling out the name of his grandfather who’d died a few months earlier. Teté adds that Sherwin has also seen the ghost of his brotherin-law Nicholas’s uncle in their home and, as a result, will no longer sleep there. Later, Tuto arrives to eat and joins in with his own story. Our neighbours, he says, have seen the ghost (multó) of a woman with her seven-year-old daughter wandering around outside Nana’s house. He adds that this is no bad thing. Ghosts like this protect a house when nobody is in it, but their presence can be problematic when people are living there. It seems that the number of inhabitants in a house is relevant to a ghost’s non/appearance. One or two will not dispel it; five or six definitely will. This sounds like reasoning to support large extended families. The story of a ghost around Nana’s house is in part corroborated independently by Pinky and two other of Nana’s nieces living in Makati, who came to stay here soon after the shell of the house was finished, while Nana was still in Hong Kong. They claim to have seen a ‘white lady’ wandering through its rooms and told Nana that she should call in an espiritista to get rid of it. A lot of Asian peoples seem to believe firmly in the existence of ghosts. The Japanese are particularly wary of them in mid-summer around the time of the obon ancestors’ return, and television programmes often include really quite scary ghost stories – often involving beautiful women who seduce innocent young men who, in turn, discover that they’ve been sleeping with a sea monster, snake or some such non-human creature. The Chinese, too, are obsessed with ghosts – at least, the Cantonese are – again, probably, because of their strong belief in an ancestral lineage. As a consequence, they do their best to avoid living near cemeteries, and many of my friends in Hong Kong were afraid of the dark when visiting me on the relatively unpopulated island of Lantau. Up the hill at the back of the house I lived in was a family graveyard of large black urns filled with bones. Ghosts in the Philippines, however, aren’t attributed to the ancestors so much as to the restless spirits of the recently departed – souls

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whom Buddhist rituals practised in China and Japan are designed to appease. Ghosts can be the spirits of animals – pigs, water buffalo, and so on – but the ones I hear about are human and always seem to be active at night. I have a feeling that a lot of people here, like my friends in Hong Kong, are quite afraid of the dark. Yesterday, I came back a little later than usual from my late afternoon walk with JR, so that it was completely dark by the time we banged on the gates of the compound to attract Nana’s attention and get her to let us in. (JR had been using the torch on his mobile phone to light our way out in the fields. This was only in part so that others driving on the road could see us.) She came running out and ticked me off sternly for being out at such a time of night. ‘My love, it’s dark. Don’t go out so late again!’ Nana hasn’t yet called in an espiritista, as Pinky and others advised, if only because she herself hasn’t seen the white lady and isn’t prepared to believe in ghosts until she does. Still, as a good Catholic, she’ll probably have the house blessed once it’s properly finished. That’s what people do here, as they do in other parts of East and South East Asia. Nicholas, too, isn’t worried by the fact that Sherwin claims to have seen a ghost in his house. This may be because his father runs a funeral parlour and he’s quite used to having corpses around. JR claims to have once slept in a coffin in the funeral parlour when he worked there for a few months and says he never saw a ghost. Teté says that’s because Nicholas’s family belongs to the Iglesia ni Cristo sect, and their members don’t believe in ghosts or, for that matter, in giving presents at Christmas. ‘Ghosts are for Roman Catholics’, they say. Nana, beware!

19

Birthday Parties It’s Teté’s birthday and Nana says we’re going over to her house for lunch. She defrosts and cooks the turkey that failed to make it to dinner on New Year’s Eve and, together with Tuto, JR and Sherwin (who has spent the night with us, sleeping on the sofa downstairs), we drive over to Visoria, about forty minutes away. Lunch goes down well. The turkey disappears amidst plate-loads of boiled rice. After we’ve finished, I’m encouraged to ‘have a rest’. I’ve learned that this means that Nana would prefer me out of the way for a while, so I take a short nap in one of the two bedrooms in Teté’s house. I re-emerge twenty minutes later to find half a dozen young men, together with those who have already eaten turkey, slurping down noodles – standard practice at birthdays, since noodles – or spaghetti, which we ate on New Year’s Eve – signify long life (a similar belief prevails at New Year in Japan). For the most part, the newcomers are nephews, but Teté’s third son, Ace, is also there, along with a couple of friends. The next thing that happens is Teté’s cake photo. She sits at the table with her precocious and somewhat spoiled five-year-old granddaughter, Sunshine, in front of a large square chocolate cake bedecked with one candle, which Sunshine insists on blowing out – not once, but twice – just before the commemorative photo is taken. The rest of us stand in a semi-circle behind Teté. Once done, Sunshine unhesitatingly sticks one not-all-that-clean forefinger into the chocolate, while we all drift away to different sitting areas, leaving the young girl to indulge herself shamelessly. When I enquire later, on my return from a walk with JR, what happened to the cake, Nana tells me that it has all gone,

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but that – dutiful wife that she is – she managed to salvage a fingermarked slice for me. The men repair to the front of the house, where they start a barbecue. Nana and I move to the back with Teté and JR who immediately starts cooking, and then eating, more noodles. Although he claims he missed out on the earlier batch, I pause to wonder whether there’s really no limit to the cavity in my newly acquired relatives’ stomachs. Once he’s despatched his noodles to the warm embrace of his bowels, JR says he’ll take me for a walk. As we round the front of the house, where smoke billows from the barbecue, we come across the men and boys – Nicholas, Tuto, his two sons Marlon and Mandel, and a deaf mute cousin, Daniel, Veronica’s son. Even though she’s in Korea right now, her family rarely joins, or is invited to join, Aquinez gatherings because nobody likes her second husband. Why not? He’s regarded as stingy – an absolute no-no here, where nobody has much money and where everyone shares what little they have. A couple of months later, for instance, one of our painters, Julius, was selected to be best man at his cousin’s marriage. His gift to the newly-weds was 5,000 pesos, or ten days’ wages. Ace has brought out a table and chairs. There are two bottles on the table – one of water, the other of Johnny Walker Black Label – some ice, and two glasses. By the time we return half an hour or more later, all the men are seated, their faces dark red, staring at nothing with an intensity that apparently often marks drinking sessions here. We talk about ‘rounds’ when drinking in a pub in the UK, but the word there refers to whose turn it is to buy a round of drinks for the gathered friends. Here a ‘round’ describes the way in which the alcohol itself is passed from one member of a drinking group to another in a circle. Unlike the ritualised passing of port after high table dinner in an Oxbridge college, the movement of the bottle here can be clockwise or anticlockwise; it doesn’t matter. The drinking session starts when somebody pours himself some whiskey, adds ice, and downs the contents in one gulp before passing the glass to his neighbour, who proceeds to do the same. Meanwhile the first has poured himself some water as a ‘chaser’ and downs that before passing it on. By which time the whiskey glass is being filled and downed by a third man. And so it goes until the bottle is finished, whereupon a second bottle (usually of local diluted rum and cognac) may well appear and be finished off in the same manner. Like Japanese when they start drinking, each of those participating may at some point dip into a plate of snacks (pulutan) on the table –

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consisting, today, of some of the pieces of chicken and vegetables barbecued earlier. Unlike Japanese, though, these family members don’t seem to say much – other than make the occasional comment that elicits the customary laughs. They don’t embark upon long, rambling, at least partly incoherent and certainly repetitive, monologues, in the way Japanese do. They don’t exchange cups, or pour alcohol for others. Rather, each man drinks, according to James Hamilton-Paterson, solely for the purpose of getting drunk, rather than for pleasure. A drinking session thus can come to seem like a form of torture that must be stoically borne (something the Japanese are rather good at, too). As a result, it proceeds with a kind of morose finality, a silently intense rhythm of pour-drink-pass, pour-drink-pass that seems to be as unstoppable as a Pacific Ocean tsunami. This isn’t always the case, though. A lot seems to depend on what is being drunk and whether the occasion is formal or informal. (Frames again.) A birthday party is classified as sort of formal, so whiskey is an appropriate drink to put away. On less formal occasions, though, men prefer beer, happily opening bottles (cap to cap, no need for bottle openers here), and drinking from them. True, it takes them quite a while to get into the groove, but once they’ve done so, there are plenty of loud voices and spontaneous laughter as jokes and stories are told. One I’ve enjoyed concerns Julius, who managed to rick his back one afternoon at work a couple of weeks back. We took him to the nearest hospital for an X-ray, just in case, and the nurse there asked him what ‘type’ he was. Sitting in a wheelchair, Julius tried to explain that he was a gentle, hard-working soul who wasn’t married, but who was fond of children. He seemed ready to propose to the nurse there and then, but she interrupted him sharply: ‘What blood type are you, Julius?’ People also lose their inhibitions enough to say – generally sing – a few words of English. At one party, Actually told us that Julius did in fact have a girlfriend – a fact which certainly made the nurse’s intervention strategically important – and that girlfriend was Actually’s cousin. ‘My caz-een’, he laughed loudly. ‘Never been touched. Never been kissed. But totally damaged! Yes’. There are also the occasional arguments, and one evening Tuto – who almost invariably becomes the most raucous participant and the last person to leave any party (accompanied by a friend or relative ushering him noisily home) – got into a stand-up fight with Actually over something to do with work. At least it would have been a stand-up fight but for the fact that Tuto fell over when Nana tried to hold him back, and had great trouble getting back into a sitting position on the ground, let alone standing upright on his feet. Which was a good way

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to let things calm down between the two men and allow each of them to go home in one piece. So alcohol does have its customary effects – for the most part, beneficial, as was the case on Teté’s birthday. By early evening, everyone is in their cups – even the ever responsible and careful Nicholas, who is married to Teté’s daughter, Yoyo, and who is the only in-law present (apart from me). As on New Year’s Eve, dancing suddenly takes over. Yoyo and Teté start gyrating happily to ghetto blasting music at some point, and very quickly the yard is filled with drunken men dancing unsteadily, and often somewhat absurdly, but happily nevertheless. Drinking, then, may be brutally intense, but it quickly prompts everyone to let off steam once more and enjoy themselves. As a good example of what I mean, let me relate what happened a few evenings ago, when Gina invited some friends around for what turned out to be one hell of a party. It started really the previous Friday, when Gina and Blessica went over to the house of one of their childhood friends, Lyn, for, I was told, a drink. I went off for my customary evening walk to be met upon my return by Tuto who said, rather memorably: ‘I you me Nana go Lyn. Me you Nana. Motor!’ This was accompanied by a smile revealing a lot of white teeth, and a vague waving of one hand in the direction of his motorbike and sidecar parked outside the gate. So, after a quick shower, I hopped (a euphemism) onto the bike behind him (no way could I get into the side car) and off we went to Lyn’s house, located just behind Tuto’s own, the one where Nana was born and brought up. I was greeted by Lyn’s seventy-seven-year old mother and ushered inside the simple breeze-block house – actually the first Filipino home I have been into since I first came to Bibiclat. Inside was a table long enough for ten people to sit around comfortably, although there were only five at the time – all women, all drinking their ‘friend’ Alfonso – a bottle of 25 per cent watered down brandy that is clearly everyone’s favourite form of inebriating liquor at £4 a litre. So, drink we did, while nibbling BBQed meats, spicy tōfu, nachos and marshmallows! And a happy band of women they turned out to be as they bemoaned the fate of poor Maxima, aged forty-four, who had just been left on her own by her husband who had gone to work in Saudi Arabia for two years and who – according to a vociferous and rather large woman, Lani – would be menopausal by the time he came back (this said with a knowing look in my direction) and thus unable to

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Figure 19.1. Bottles up! Lyn, with friend Alfonso. © Brian Moeran.

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have any children ever. During the course of the next two evenings, I learned that Maxima, or Sima for short, had only been married for two years and, rather remarkably given the propensity of Nana’s nephews and nieces to generate offspring at the age of eighteen, had so far failed to conceive. Now, proclaimed Lani, was the time for her to do so, while her husband was away. That would serve him right for deserting her and making her feel so lonely. And so it went on. As if Maxima wasn’t sufficiently splendid a name to give to a diminutive woman who is even shorter (by a full inch) than Nana, we were soon joined by Segundina (or Dina), one of Nana’s 40+ cousins. Segundina isn’t the second child in her branch of the family, but the last; nor was she born in February. Having exhausted the two possibilities I could think of for her having such a splendid name, I was informed by Lani that it was an appellation that one of her greatgrandparents, or maybe even earlier (a wave with one arm towards the heavens), had had. And have some more Alfonso, please, Papa B, if you don’t mind drinking with us. (Papa B was the name used for me in Hong Kong by Nana’s friends and seems to have crossed the South China Sea along with Nana herself.) Not at all, say I. Whereupon Lyn – who is a couple of years older than Nana, but thin as a rake, and who gets extremely happy very quickly once Alfonso makes his appearance (her husband is working in Manila), cried memorably as she clinked glasses with everyone: ‘Bottles up! Bottles up!’ She then, literally, collapsed on the floor in hysterics when I corrected her, her legs giving way underneath her, either from laughter or from the effects of Alfonso (we were on the second of three bottles by then). By last night, therefore, the stage had been set for a repeat performance. The previous Friday we had been later joined by one rather charming man, Pogé, who turned out to be Maxima’s cousin, and Christian, Blessica’s classmate, who had just returned from over ten years in Saudi Arabia (where he was working for the Ministry of Defence!) and who had rolled into Lyn’s house a bit like a drunk camel and embraced me long and furiously while muttering sweet nothings in my ear. I have a feeling that Alfonso had driven him to mistake me for a woman. Anyway, last night, Lani, Maxima, Lyn, Segundina, Ben, Pogé and one other sombre gentleman (also a classmate) strolled into Gina’s garden, sat themselves down and ate spaghetti with hardly a word said. My God, I thought to myself, this is going to be a dour evening. Pull the other one. Here was young Papa B sitting with two sisters, two pairs of cousins, five elementary school classmates, two godmothers of one of the cousins’

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children – all of whom know one another so well that not much needs to be said before they all start laughing at their shared recollections. Not myself having any childhood friends, I really feel quite envious of people like Nana who know they have people to fall back on whenever they need help or feel a bit down in the dumps. Maxima, therefore, began to smile, even to laugh, as Alfonso came to her lonesome aid. And her cousin, Pogé, made sure she didn’t mope by refilling her glass on one side, while her neighbour Lyn, ever the happy party-girl, filled it on the other (while ensuring that Segundina’s glass was overflowing and second to none in terms of content). Many bottles up were toasted. Nana brought out her YouTube-aided karaoke machine and away we went, singing soft-rock romantic songs by Air Supply, Lionel Richie, Rod Stewart, Ed Sheeran, Westlife, someone called Lobo, and whoever else likes to sing in that syrupy mode that Filipinos love, until about one in the morning. I asked Nana if it was really OK to make such a noise when all the neighbours were trying to sleep. Shouldn’t we turn it off at 11 pm? But she assured me that it was fine and that nobody would complain. After all, one of them had been having their own extended party all day Saturday into Sunday. I’ll say this for Filipinos. They really know how to enjoy themselves. And they actually sing pretty well, too. At least, they do when compared with drunken Japanese. Not only that, but they knew all the words of all the syrupy English and American songs they went through. It made me recall how Blessica, when lost for words, will suddenly trot out a pop song phrase like ‘Waiting for you’, ‘Near, far, wherever you are’, ‘If you look inside my heart’, ‘This could be heaven, or this could be hell’, or ‘Another one bites the dust’, or something equally absurd in the context, but which reduces one and all to hysterics and a series of high fives with those around. I guess what surprises me, after my many years in Japan, is how the women here don’t just sit around and ‘decorate’ the occasion, but really get involved in drinking parties. The men will sit with their arms crossed, except when topping up, or reaching for ice to put in, their glasses (when I asked why they all sat with their arms crossed, Pogé said ‘because it’s cold’. The temperature was in the low 20s at the time). In the meantime, the women are singing and screeching with delight as they start to dance and, of course, insist on my joining them. So I end up doing my usual silly tricks like pretending to embrace a very small woman, but making sure my arms cross above her head and so embrace nothing but the evening air – or then by going down on my knees to dance with one of them – and everyone is ‘Happiii, happiii! Bottles up, Papa B. We love Alfonso!’

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The party marking the first birthday of Yoyo and Nicholas’s son, Josh, isn’t so riotous. After all, the little fellow hasn’t yet been introduced to the delights of Alfonso or any other alcoholic drink, so behaviour during this event is somewhat restrained (and its enjoyment, perhaps, suffers as a result of its abstemious nature). Nicholas and Yoyo met when he was in his third, and she her second, year at high school. Nicholas’s cousin was a close friend of Yoyo, which ‘explains’ how they met (not unusual in several longterm high school relationships I’ve heard about here). Nicholas himself comes from a comparatively wealthy family; his father runs a funeral business in San José, about a one-and-a-half hour drive from Bibiclat, and the young couple live in the family compound behind the main house and funeral parlour facing the street. Nicholas has a good job and, as a ‘proper’ Filipino husband, is reluctant to let Yoyo, who is a trained accountant, earn a living, even though she wants to help out her mother and younger brother, Sherwin (both of whom need her financial assistance). Fortunately, Nicholas’s parents are well off enough to help Tété out whenever she needs a ride into town, or heavy sacks of pig feed transported to her home. The first year of life for all babies is seen to be dangerous. They’re susceptible to disease, and therefore might fall ill, and even die. So all families celebrate the successful conclusion of a new-born babe’s first year on earth. They do this mostly at home, inviting relatives and, depending on their financial wherewithal, friends and neighbours. But some, like Nicholas’s parents, like to celebrate in style and so show off their wealth to those around them. This is the case with baby Josh. The family has hired a private function room (costing 30,000 pesos, or £500, in all) in the nearby outlet of a restaurant chain called Max’s, and we are instructed to be there at 4.30 pm for ‘dinner’. Given the distance and the unpredictability of the traffic, together with the fact that we have to make a detour to pick up, first, Teté at her home in Visoria, and then Sherwin from his school, we do remarkably well to arrive at 4.35 pm. As we pull into the restaurant car park, however, there’s some nervous muttering in the back (the Xpander is carrying six of us today, since Blessica has rejoined us after a brief stay in Manila). Nicholas’s gigantic Nissan SUV isn’t there. Are we too early? Is it really 4.30 we’re supposed to be there? Have we even got the right day? We troop nervously inside the restaurant, where we’re met by a smiling manager who reassures us. Yes, indeed, the Maravilla family has reserved the function room today – from 5 pm. Everyone breaks out into smiles again. A marvel indeed!

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So we wait, until Nicholas’s father – a quiet, slim man in his midfifties – arrives a quarter of an hour or so later. After slight hesitation, he greets us and we’re invited to take our seats in the function room, where eight tables, seating between six and eight people each, are arranged along the windowless room. At one end is a line of silverplated lidded serving cauldrons with food; at the other a small stage, at the back of which, flanked by two columns of multi-coloured balloons, hangs a large silk-like banner embroidered with the words ‘Happy Birthday Josh’ and the image of an oversized chicken underneath. For those of us who might be blind or fail to see this banner, a ghetto blaster blares out a series of – let’s face it, terrifying – children’s songs: ‘Jack and Jill’, who had a nasty accident when they went to fetch a bucket of water from, of all places, the top of a hill; and ‘Hush a Bye Baby’, whose chances of surviving its first year of life were minimal once there was any kind of breeze to rock its cradle in the treetops. Even ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’, in the version I know, threatens to have a child eaten by a crocodile. In which case, it doesn’t really matter if you forget to scream or not. In the meantime, other guests are arriving and taking their places at one or other of the tables set for dinner. There’s no ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ table here, and no particular seats that should be taken by particular people (that sort of thing is – in theory, at least – reserved for weddings, where parents are aligned on the same side as either bride or groom and face each other, while their first and second sponsors from each side sit ‘below’ them, and then other members of the family and remaining guests). Filipinos, I’ve noticed, are in general remarkably casual about what would to us be quite formal occasions. The only ‘framing’ criterion today seems to be that families sit together – something which, in part, explains why both Nicholas and Yoyo move between his and her families’ tables throughout the evening. At one stage, they pose with baby Josh at the head of every table for a group photo, taken by the restaurant manager who also acts as MC for the occasion. In a way – in spite of the small stage with its birthday banner and, later, half a dozen presents still in their shopping mall carrier bags (at which a properly brought up Japanese housewife would blanch!) placed in front of it – the lack of ‘framing’ devices is refreshing. Japanese, for example, devote a lot of time to giving speeches reminding everyone about why they’re attending a wedding, country valley sports event, or birthday party. Those present are obliged to adopt a particular posture that suits each frame – kneeling formally, straight backed, with their legs tucked up beneath them; or, more casually, sitting cross-legged

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on the tatami floor. We Europeans tend to go through similar, though less formal, frames when, at dinner or cocktail, parties, we make ‘small talk’ by discussing such trivialities as the weather, the latest football results, TV programmes, or whatever else is deemed to be a ‘safe’ topic of conversation (while often trying to balance a glass of wine in one hand, a plate of food in the other, and wondering how we can eat from the latter when we lack a third hand. God really should have been a better designer of the human body!). It’s only later that we open up and try out more serious – and possibly ‘dangerous’ – topics (like EU subsidies for Brexit-voting farmers, the meaning of ‘art’, abolition of the monarchy, and so on). Filipinos seem quite easy-going about the need to frame their lives, however – possibly because they revel in apparent chaos. Still, every now and then, they’re called to order – this time by the manager of Max’s restaurant who stands on stage and says into the microphone: ‘We are here to celebrate the first birthday of…?’ She pauses, as a few voices call out ‘Josh!’ But she isn’t satisfied. ‘Once again. We are here to celebrate the birthday of baby…’ This time the word ‘Josh!’ is chorused by all loud enough to satisfy her. At which point, a man steps from behind the MC and starts to utter a prayer. All stand and turn towards the stage. The priest – clearly from Iglesia ni Cristo, the Maravilla family’s non-conformist Church, which Yoyo herself has now joined – is dressed in ordinary shirt and dark trousers, so that he, too, fails to frame himself as a ‘priest’. Those present (now transformed from friends and family into a congregation) from time to time intone ‘Amen’ and ‘Opo!’ (‘Yes’) at the end of each sentence uttered reverently in Tagalog by the priest. The only guests who remain sitting are several small children (thereby marking themselves out as not yet being adults and, therefore, full members of society), who continue to play at their tables, while Josh expresses his confusion (and possible displeasure at the whole affair) by bawling loudly throughout. He isn’t mollified, either, by the nursery rhymes played once more after the end of the prayer. As we sit back down again, a waitress brings two jugs of sweet iced tea to our table, and sets down three bottles of Hot Sauce, Banana Ketchup and Max’s Worcestershire Sauce. We are invited to go and get our dinner from the buffet at the other end of the room from the stage. There we encounter, first and foremost, large quantities of rice, followed by chicken, a kind of meat loaf, mixed vegetables, chop suey, and sweet and sour fish fillet. As we set to with our spoons and forks, Nicholas and Yoyo appear with their, for the moment quiet, baby Josh and pose for a photograph with all Yoyo’s side of the family (none of

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whom, incidentally, includes any relatives of Teté’s dead husband, Felix, who, like me, was born on January 27. Nana says there’s ‘bad blood’ between Teté and Felix’s brother and sisters living either side of her in the Rosario compound. More of this in due course). As in the drinking session I described earlier, there’s comparatively little – indeed, virtually no – interaction among the guests. There’s no conversation, no movement of people, between tables; and hardly any at each separate table. When Teté and Blessica, with Sherwin between them, start swaying to the music, I have to wonder if it’s only the Aquinez family that always seems hell bent on partying. All chance of their suddenly standing up and turning the function room into an impromptu dance floor, however, is brought to an abrupt end when the MC reappears (she is serving other guests in the main part of the restaurant when not concerned with us) to announce that it is ‘baby cake-cutting’ time. This means an opportunity for us to photograph the happy family, and for young Sunshine to get her fingers into the icing of not one, but three cakes. But first, the music of ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is played. Everyone claps rhythmically, before we’re asked to join in and sing the song again. This we do with gusto (ma non troppo molto). Once we’re finished, in comes Chickie Boy, apparently the mascot for Max’s restaurant chain (and now, I realise, the chicken on the banner at the back of the Figure 19.2. Sunshine, Yoyo and Nicholas, with baby Yosh and Chickie Boy. © Brian Moeran.

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stage). It (He? She?) does a short disco dance, before posing for photos with the happy – and, let us not forget, blessed – family. Others join in for their photo opportunity with dear Chickie, while Sunshine takes advantage of the shift in focus of people’s attention to once more dip her fingers into all three cakes’ icing cream. She then decides that chocolate is her favourite and sets to with undisguised relish. Not for that long, though, because she’s called upon – once again – to blow out her younger sibling’s candle (maybe she needed the practice when at Teté’s last week). Mysteriously, though, we never get offered the chance to eat any of the cakes. Instead, as guests begin to disappear – either to powder their noses and relieve themselves, or out of the restaurant into the dark – Nicholas’s mother, an exceedingly large lady who you definitely wouldn’t wish to be seated beside in economy class on any kind of plane, orders the MC to put each of the cakes into a box. One of these I later see her giving to her son, but the other two she piles on top of each other and carries out to her car. Chickie, who’s been dancing somewhat disconsolately on his, her, or its own, takes his (her or its) leave, and Nicholas is called upon to give a speech. This lasts for all of eighteen seconds and is over before the MC has adjusted the volume on the mike so that we can hear what it is he may have said. My heart goes out to Nicholas whose brevity makes him my immediate friend – as well as nephew-in-law. He clearly knows how to keep his foreign guest happy. But next it’s the turn of the chocolate-cream fingered Sunshine to perform. Rather remarkably, she stands with aplomb in front of one and all and does an amusing impression of her mother scolding Josh, and has us all laughing. Not bad for a five-year-old who usually stamps her foot and cries when gently teased. Maybe the chocolate cream helped, in the way that a glass of wine (or two) aids me on such occasions. An hour and a half has passed and the party is more or less over. A couple of bodies lounge at each of four or five tables, while Sherwin slips away and helps himself to a third plateful of food which he eats alone in one corner of the room. As Josh’s grandmother and Yoyo’s mother, Teté must stay to the bitter end. Which means that we must, too, since we’re all travelling together. Yoyo joins her mum and starts catching up on a dinner that for the most part she missed as she comforted the bawling Josh. The baby is now being carried by Nicholas as he shuffles around the room exchanging a few words with people here and there. His father did much the same a little earlier, although, when he came and sat down at our table, he said nothing – as if simply being in the presence of his guests was enough. It seems like the funeral business doesn’t inspire loquaciousness.

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One ginormously fat family of parents and two children has spread itself over two tables. The dad, who recently had a slight heart attack, helped us last year when we wanted to get married quickly during Nana’s short Christmas holiday back in the Philippines. When we met again earlier in the evening, he tickled the palm of my right hand as he shook it. A secret mason? Could be. He’s important, a potential fixer, because his cousin is Mayor of Santo Domingo. Josh starts crying again and Nicholas quickly delivers him to his mother’s breast, which is gently squeezed a few minutes later by an older woman as she takes her leave. I’ve noticed this kind of physical intimacy before. Sherwin and Blessica, for example, at one stage earlier on during dinner, synchronised their dancing body movements so that their shoulders and elbows touched each other regularly. During New Year, I noticed Blessica’s older son, Joel, pat his mother on the bum as they talked and laughed together. And, of course, everyone piles together into one bed when there aren’t enough mattresses to go around. I’ve read somewhere that Filipino culture is a culture of touch – significantly, also, in the way people reach out to touch heaven. As the MC announces that our time is officially up and starts to put all the presents into a large plastic rubbish bag, the party is clearly ending, as T.S. Eliot perspicaciously wrote, not with a bang, but a whimper. So I head for the loo, only to called back by Blessica on my way out of the restaurant: ‘You must do something’, she cries happily. ‘Haircut!’ Somewhat confused, I go back to the table occupied now only by Teté, Yoyo, Nana and Blessica. It transpires that I am to be honoured. In the Philippines, parents don’t cut their babies’ hair until they’re one year old – something I hadn’t known, but which now explains why baby Josh’s hair is long enough to make him look like a girl. So, the first haircut takes on special importance and the qualities of the person cutting it are thought to be transferred to the baby, through some form of sympathetic magic. Hair is more than the merely physical and material. As scholars like Edmund Leach and Anthony Synnott have shown, it’s probably the most powerful symbol of individual and group identity. Think of all the variations of hair (or lack thereof) that we sport on different parts of our bodies. Think punks, think monks, think porn stars. At the same time, a new-born baby isn’t a full member of society until it reaches the end of its first year of life. As such it’s a marginal being which relies on others to protect it from sickness and danger. Success in this demands some kind of special ritual. So Josh’s first birthday party is held in the presence of members of both sides of the child’s

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family to mark a transition from endangered new-born baby to social being. Cutting his hair calls attention to this close relation between the physical body and the social body. Somewhat mistakenly, perhaps, Yoyo believes that, because I was a university professor, I must be intelligent. Therefore, by my cutting his hair, Josh will himself become intelligent – something that’s of great concern in a society where education is seen to be an important path to success in life. Though not convinced by this argument, but eager not to enter into a philosophical discussion of the meaning of ‘intelligence’ or, for that matter, of contagious magic, and anxious to get home before too late, I hesitatingly accede to this request (it wouldn’t do to look too keen to accept such an offer). So Blessica hands me a very large pair of yellow-handled scissors. Teté holds a tuft of Josh’s hair. Nana prepares to take a photo with her iPhone. On the command ‘Cut!’ I snip the proffered lock and place it on a paper serviette which Nana quickly wraps. Recalling what happens with candle wax and the exorcism of evil spirits, I ask Yoyo: ‘Where do you put it? Under your pillow?’ To judge by her slightly puzzled expression, the answer is no. An ordinary box will do.

20

No Money, No Hangover Today is Saturday – workers’ pay day. Nana was pissed off with Tuto last week because he’d got drunk one night and missed work the following day. Last Saturday, she refused to hand over his wages, telling him he was always complaining he had no money, and yet he had had enough to buy himself drinks for a night out and take a day off into the bargain. This morning, Blessica and I chuckled about how her youngest sister (who was in Manila having her own night out with a friend) had dealt with her older brother. When Tuto passed by later, I teased him with: ‘No money today, Tuto. You’re a bad boy!’ Tuto laughed in his usual happy manner, before replying philosophically, with a dose of Catholic fatalism: ‘No money, no hangover!’

21

Wiping and Weeping Working abroad expands local people’s horizons in many different ways. Nana taught Blessica how to make a quiche a couple of days ago, and now I’m eating the excellent result of her instruction. When I commend Blessica, Nana says: ‘See if she remembers what I told her’. So I ask Blessica how she made it. ‘You put in egg,’ She begins, ‘And cheese. And’, as if reading off the packet, ‘All Purpose. Plain Flour. Then you massage with wiping cream’. She realises her mistake and starts collapsing with laughter. ‘Sorry’, she manages to say in the midst of her giggles. ‘Weeping cream!’

22

Circumcision When Blessica’s son, Joel, a genial and gentle soul in his late twenties, visited us over New Year, Nana, who hadn’t seen him in some years, greeted him by asking whether his willy had grown any bigger since she’s last seen it. She then reminded him in front of everyone of how she and two of her nieces had looked after Joel when he was still a boy, aged five or so. One day Pinky and Ivy pinned him by the arms, while Nana opened up his shorts and pulled out his willy to have a look at it. All three young women had been disappointed at its smallness (Nana held up finger and thumb to illustrate just how small), and Nana even got a ruler to measure it. It seemed his foreskin was almost as long as the diminutive member itself. Which brings me nicely to the topic of circumcision. I’ve been reading a rather nice book, Playing with Water: Alone on a Philippine Island, by James Hamilton-Paterson, an Englishman a couple of years older than myself, who three decades ago wrote about life in a remote part of the Philippines. In it, he mentions how a group of village boys began rooting around outside his hut for guava leaves which they wanted to put on their willies because they’d all just been circumcised – a custom which takes place because of the belief – at least in those days – that a man couldn’t father children unless he was circumcised. Definitely not on in a society that prides itself on having large families. This led me to ask Nana at breakfast whether circumcision was something that is practised in Bibiclat. After initial confusion – after all, this wasn’t really the kind of topic normally brought up for conversation by her family while having their breakfast – she laughed

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and said that, yes, in the old days sometimes, a peer group of boys (barkada) would be rounded up for circumcision once they reached the age of seven years or above (usually, Blessica added, about ten). A boy’s mother would get hold of a white T shirt or cloth, fold it in a particular way and cut a larger and smaller hole in it to tie round and protect her son’s willy after the deed was done. The boys would also wear long skirts (sayaw, or balda if they had elastic round the waist), just as Filipino men did in the old days, although nowadays boys wear oversize shorts. They would then be taken somewhere for the operation (known as tulí). ‘To a specialist?’ I asked. ‘A barber, perhaps?’ ‘No,’ Nana laughed. ‘Just to someone – a father – who had the guts to do it! But yes, maybe a barber because he is the one who uses a cut-throat razor’. (This was later confirmed by Malou when she came over to visit.) She then did something that I, born in a pre-digital era, hadn’t immediately considered: get onto the Internet and find a news item on YouTube about circumcision in Marakina, a barrio in Manila, where dozens of boys are filmed lying on table beds, doing their utmost not to scream too loudly as they undergo what is surely a very painful operation. Nana laughed and laughed as she watched the news clip, and likened this barrio group activity to the way in which everyone will come together now and then before going off to one part of the community and cleaning it (what she referred to as ‘operation linis’). There is an alternative to this mediatised ‘operation tulí’ (which the people here pronounce tulé, just to confuse me slightly with their dialect). A circumcision specialist will go around the different barangay health centres and perform the operation there on boys aged seven years or above for free (libreng tulí). Those who miss out on the opportunity are obliged to pay 1,600 pesos, equivalent to four days’ work for a labourer. Still, a mass circumcision ceremony is an unusual event, not entirely dissimilar in its publicity to the state circumcision ritual involving royal princes, which used to be performed by the Merino in Madagascar and described by Maurice Bloch. Its public nature suggests that circumcision isn’t just a physical operation performed upon boys, but that it has broader symbolic significance. Blessica had her distinctive (as always) take on what used to go on. ‘They take boys to the river, yes? The ambulario – organic doctor – make to cut. There he cut the boy’s pututoi and throw skin in river. He chew guava leaves when cut and spit on the boy’s pututoi. There is superstition belief girl must not watch the cut. If she does, then

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pututoi become big’. She started to laugh: ‘And red’. She laughed even more: ‘And bi-ig! Yes, swo-len. So boy clean it every day with water and guava leaves, in the morning and evening, in the comfort room, where private’. Although she probably wasn’t aware of it, Blessica’s explanation has got me thinking. For a start, the operation is performed on village boys by someone described as a ‘wandering’ stranger (ambulario). This suggests that, since circumcision is designed to enable young men to have children and to prolong, therefore, their families in the village, the violence of the operation should be performed by an outsider, rather than insider – and by a man, not a woman. There’s also a second, more or less to be expected, opposition established between men and women, where the presence of the latter affects the healing of a boy’s penis and, in relation to size, suggests that the woman who copulates with him in the future will suffer discomfort during sex. This in itself implies that a woman’s vagina should be small (or, at least, not overly large) since this reflects the kind of modesty on which Filipino people, and women in particular, pride themselves. Finally, the human body is coupled with its natural habitat as the juices (blood) of one are treated by those of the other. Guava leaves are known to have strong antioxidant powers and to act as a powerful astringent to protect the skin and fight wound and soft-tissue infections. This interpretation of Blessica’s authoritative description, alas, began to fall apart as she proceeded to add that actually the ambulario – who nowadays is often a midwife and thus a woman – only made a small cut in the foreskin which was, therefore, not fully detached from the penis (so the bit about throwing parts into the river and not keeping them under the pillow, or in a box, or whatever, now made little sense). As far as I could gather from this, to me somewhat strange, revised account, the foreskin remained attached to the boy’s penis for the rest of his life (flapping around like a ‘tickler’ sex toy?). A later search on the Internet, however, informed me that in Ancient Judaism only the foreskin extending beyond the penis’ glands was cut, while the rest remained intact. Among people of the Visayas in the Philippines, too, tuli consisted of a lengthwise, rather than circular, cut and was thus technically supercision, not circumcision. When, at the time, I expressed my confusion, Blessica said simply, ‘Ask Tuto. He show his pututoi to you, so you can see’. And once again hooted helplessly with laughter. Clearly, as Nana herself said at one point, in the past this was very much a man’s ritual, so the girls never knew exactly what went on.

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They could merely observe their brothers wandering around the house in some discomfort for a week after the event, wearing very large pairs of shorts which they held out in front of them to stop the cloth from rubbing on and aggravating the wound. Telay, who is seventeen and in her first year at senior high school in Manila, giggled at the memory of her two Army recruit brothers after their circumcision. Still, like many initiation ceremonies around the world, circumcision sets the newly circumcised boys apart from society for a period of time, after which they emerge as ‘men’, fully prepared to find a mate, have sex and father children. This change in state is marked, firstly, by boys’ removal from the outside world and then their reintroduction into it when their wounds have healed. According to traditional beliefs, then, reproduction of the family depends on the circumcision ritual. At the same time, though, circumcision separates ritual death from ritual rebirth – a bit like the bride who was locked out of the church prior to her wedding ceremony. Before being circumcised, initiates are boys: afterwards, they are men. For a week or so in between, they’re neither children nor adults. They have no place in society as they’re confined to their homes. Once they emerge from their seclusion, however, they are – like initiates in other parts of the world – charged with power and, in a sense, dangerous. They can make love to women and father children. For her part, Blessica doesn’t believe the superstition that a man cannot impregnate a woman if he isn’t circumcised, and emphasises instead that circumcision is necessary for the sake of cleanliness. If you don’t get circumcised, the urine won’t pass out of your penis properly and your foreskin can get infected. That’s why boys are circumcised. This explanation neatly exemplifies the anthropological distinction made by Mary Douglas between cleanliness and defilement, between purity and danger. The ritual of circumcision recognizes the power of potential disorder in both health and the family system resulting from boys retaining their foreskins. Jhon-Jhon, one of Nana’s elementary school classmates, later added that if a boy hadn’t been circumcised, he would wake up in the morning with ‘a morning star in each eye’. This delightful turn of phrase, it transpired, had nothing to do with romance, as those of us brought up on American pop songs might be led to believe, but simply referred to the discharge, or ‘sleep’, that forms in one’s eyes during the night. If a boy weren’t circumcised, so went the belief, he’d end up with sleep all over his eyelids. Is this bodily discharge somehow connected symbolically to that of the juice of the chewed guava leaves? Sleep in one’s eyes is matter out of place, a threat to social order premised on reproduction. Guava leaves cleanse and enable that same order.

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Can one go further and suggest that the two discharges – from the eye of the penis and the eyes themselves – are related? A boy with sleep all over his eyelids could also have wet dreams. Both sleep and semen become, then, matter out of place. Semen should be used for no other purpose then to beget children. ‘Only in the Philippines!’ Jhon-Jhon laughed. ‘Maybe, only in Bibiclat!’ When Tuto appeared in the middle of the morning, as is his wont on Sundays, his niece Gianna – who had come here for the weekend to make sure that the workmen were completing the house according to her architect’s plan – immediately asked him about his own circumcision. Without a hint of surprise at the question, Tuto explained that he’d gone swimming in the river near the hanging bridge with a couple of friends, and that they had all been cut when they came out of the water. The guy who did it was called Ipen and had only one arm. He happened to live by the river, which was why they were circumcised there. Although dead now, he did the job because Agapito was too scared to do it himself. (So, while not being exactly a ‘stranger’, Ipen’s residence by the river – as well as his physical incompleteness – set him apart from other villagers.) And how exactly was the operation performed? Figure 22.1. The hanging bridge, site of Tuto’s circumcision. © Brian Moeran.

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Ipen first hammered a block of wood upright into the ground. He then had the boys kneel in front of it and take out their penises, which he laid on the block. Then he cut off the foreskin with two quick blows ‘tsu-tsuk!’ Tuto then imitated the pain he felt by placing his hands over his crotch, drawing in his stomach and grimacing. He was fourteen years old at the time. ‘Over age!’ Telay put in quickly from behind him where she was sitting in the shade of the mango tree. But Tuto went on to clarify my confusion caused by Blessica’s description. There were two methods of carrying out a circumcision, he explained. One was a partial cut, of the kind described by Blessica. The other was a full cut, whereupon the bits removed were thrown into the river. This was the ‘beautiful’ way, and the way Tuto himself was cut. He wore a sayaw skirt for one day, then outsize shorts for another five. Ipen used such force when he cut Tuto’s foreskin that the guava leaves he was chewing spewed out of his mouth and dribbled down his shirt front. So he had to chew some more quickly and put them on the wound. According to the nurse, Malou, nowadays most boys are circumcised before they become teenagers. Gianna’s brothers, for example, were eight or nine when the deed was done in Manila. But Tuto’s sons were circumcised at more or less the same age as their father – at thirteen and fourteen years old. Tuto added that he knows of two or three men here who didn’t get circumcised until they were twenty years old – thirty, even – because they were scared. They did so in the end because in Bibiclat it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. I suspect that boys living in big cities like Manila are circumcised younger than their counterparts in the countryside. I guess what impresses me most is the matter-of-fact way in which Tuto described what was both an intimate and painful operation. I felt my innards churning at the very thought of submitting myself to what sounds like a fairly barbaric practice. So it’s a relief to learn that, nowadays, boys – like JR and Sherwin – are usually administered an anaesthetic before undergoing circumcision. It hasn’t stopped me from imagining, though, when some particularly strange dish is placed before me at mealtimes, that I might be about to sample stewed foreskins for dinner. One more of Blessica’s ‘exotic foods’.

23

Blackness As we drive to Pantabangan Dam again, I spot half a dozen local people walking on the roadside in one barangay carrying a two-foothigh statue of the Virgin Mary, dressed in blue as usual, but with very long straw yellow hair. When I ask Nana about whether this is a common custom, she says that in some barangay, inhabitants take a statue like this from one house to another and leave it there for a day or two before taking it on to another house. And so on, round the barangay. But yellow hair? She doesn’t know. Much later, on our way back in the evening, we pass an immensely long (almost one kilometer) procession of cars, many with yellow emergency lights blinking, and headed by an ambulance with its own flashing red and blue lights, moving at a stately pace along the main road (fortunately in the opposite direction to ourselves). Again, I ask what this might be. JR suggests it is ‘Black Nazarene’, although that particular feast takes place on 9 January (not 19, which is today) in the Quiapo district of Manila. The contrast, though, between the straw-haired Virgin and a darkskinned Christ is striking, even if I have no idea what has been going on in the two villages or barangay located along the same stretch of road somewhere between Talavera and Rizal. The ‘purity’ of the mother; the ‘polluted’ nature of the sin-bearing son. This is where anthropological imagination, rather than ethnographic fact, is likely to take over. Still, one can give facts a try and see where they take us. Filipino scholars tell us that the Black Nazarene comes from Mexico. It is said that a group of Augustinian Recollect missionaries from that country landed in Manila in 1606, bringing with them a

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statue of a dark-skinned Jesus Christ kneeling on one knee to carry a large wooden cross. The statue was enshrined the same year in St John the Baptist Church at Luneta before being moved in 1608 to a bigger church nearby. Over a century and a half later, in 1787, the image was transferred (traslación) to Quiapo Church in Manila whose patron saint is – as in Bibiclat – St John the Baptist. The statue has survived fires that destroyed the church twice, as well as two earthquakes, the floods of numerous typhoons, and bombings during World War II. Fire (on the Spanish galleon bearing the statue from Mexico to the Philippines) is said by some to explain why the statue’s wood is black; others say it became black because of the smoke from candles burned before it; yet others that it is made of mesquite wood which is naturally black and, of course, found in Mexico. On John the Baptist’s feast day, about half a million devotees ignore the perils of injury, a stampede, even death, to walk barefoot in procession with a replica of the statue, watched by as many as eight – some say eighteen – million bystanders. Fire purifies, bringing the black Christ closer to the straw-haired Virgin. The traslacion, or ‘transfer of the image’, which took place back in 1787, thus involves a process of magical osmosis. Over a distance of more than four miles, these barefoot devotees snake their way barefoot slowly from the Quirino grandstand in Luneta to the Basilica Minore de Nazareno in Quiapo, in Metro Manila. But first, at the Quirino, devotees line up for hours to kiss the statue of the Nazarene in the hope that it will wring a miracle in their lives. They also wipe its feet and other parts of its body with their hand towels or cloths for the same reason. Then they set out on a journey which can take up to nineteen hours as, in emulation of Jesus’ carrying of his cross barefoot through the streets of Jerusalem to Calvary, they walk along a multitude of narrow, winding streets until they reach their destination. The suffering face of the Nazarene is believed to mirror the various everyday sufferings of a multitude of contemporary Filipinos. The festival is thus seen as a celebration of victory of the subjugated, suppressed and voiceless. The Filipino anthropologist, Fernando Nakpil Zialcita, has suggested, on the basis of questioning Quiapo devotees, that the Nazarene’s blackness is not identified with skin so much as associated with sea and fire, destruction and survival, life and death, and the dignity of being both non-white and members of a proletariat. He has described the Nazareno devotion as an ‘awesome’ display of gratitude to God for graces bestowed upon devotees and their families. This devotion he sees as consistent with Filipino loyalty – a loyalty which

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is often limited only to the family and to the ‘angkan’ or clan. As such, he continues, it fails to take into account ‘social responsibility to a group larger than their family’, and he points out how devotees pay no attention to others outside their extended family since they leave garbage everywhere en route and participate in what Zialcata refers to as ‘corrupt practices’. The local church in Bibiclat – the one which awakens me every morning before dawn with dirge-like music blaring out over loudspeakers located in its tower – is also dedicated to John the Baptist. As with the Black Nazarene, the saint also occasions an annual féria in Bibiclat (and Nueva Ecija in general) on 24 June every year. On this day, early in the morning, local people (and others who come from elsewhere) go out into the fields and smear their faces and other exposed parts of their bodies with mud, before covering their heads with a cloak of banana leaves that extends down to the ground. There is apparently no ritual significance to the use of banana fronds. They are just practical as a covering and comfortable to wear. Sometimes, people use long grass instead. But the effect is one of a brown-grey blackness – of people moving ghost-like through the emergent light of dawn as they go round houses in the barangay and are given a candle or a few coins, which they take to the Catholic church and offer to St John the Baptist’s statue. If they have not been given a candle on their rounds, they can buy one in front of the church, and light it inside. Nana says that, when they attend the service in the church, it looks as if the aisle and pews are covered with mud – a blackness purified once more, like the black Nazarene, through fire, this time of burning candles. But fire might be an appropriate metaphor, too, for the mud festival in a different way, since it is held in the middle of summer when the country as a whole is enveloped in steamy heat. The festival’s image of ‘blackness’ in Bibiclat would seem also to invoke the mysteries of the soil – something to be expected of an agricultural community, as we know from traditional black images in medieval France and Spain, as well as Mexico. Reasons for participating in the festival vary. One is to say thanks after overcoming a serious illness. Another, more general reason, is connected to the Japanese invasion and says that people cover themselves in mud and banana leaves in gratitude at having evaded execution by the Japanese army. Whatever, gratitude appears to be the guiding emotion. Other events take place at the same time as the religious rites. There is a carabao water buffalo race in which the winner of the final (there

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are heats, a semi-final and a final) wins a prize of 50,000 pesos (£800). Two greased bamboo poles are also erected, with a pouch at the top of each containing 1,000 pesos. Boys try to shin up the pole, after having covered their bodies with ash in order to offset the slippery surface of the bamboo. This can cause great amusement among onlookers as the boys fail to keep a hand or foot hold on the pole and, at the moment of trying to remove the pouch, lose their grip and slide all the way back down to the ground. Mud, ash… there seems to be a certain amount of ‘blackness’ here. Not only do people become ‘dirty’, but the natural habitat of water buffalo, which are black, is mud. All of this John the Baptist (San Juan Bautista) washes clean, a physical act which, by contagion, becomes spiritual. Symbolically, the son is cleansed to regain the purity of his virgin mother. Woman thus becomes the spiritual norm to which all men aspire? But there is more. Like dirt, mud and ash are – in the words of Mary Douglas – ‘matter out of place’. They suggest that there should be a social order, a given arrangement of things which people violate for a day every year. Mud, ash and blackness suggest that the secular ways of Philippine society need to be challenged – the social distinctions that stem from enormous wealth and consequent power, patron-client relations, and the necessity for ordinary people to sacrifice themselves on behalf of their families. The Black Nazarene and Taong putik mud festivals challenge the inequalities of everyday life, by allowing participants to withdraw from their social environment and enter into communion with a Christian deity. The Catholic Church offers to stand against these social ills: to put matter back into place, to make dirt clean. The annual rite of St John the Baptist’s Day in Bibiclat, therefore, imposes order on the chaos of everyday experience. It tidies up the injustice of society. By first defiling themselves with mud, and by then cleansing themselves through prayer and water to wash away the dirt, supplicants embrace a structure of ideas which affirms how society should be. The liminality that they enter as mud-smeared, banana leaf-clad ghosts and leave as purified human beings echoes the liminality of their everyday existence in Philippine society as a whole. There are two postscripts to this account. First, the present barangay captain of Bibiclat is Mauro Guevara – Mauro the ‘Moor,’ from the Greek μαυρος meaning ‘black’. I like the idea of a Black Guevara. It beats Che any day.

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My second postscript is more serious and concerns the carabao (or kalabaw in Pilipino). Everyone tells me that the animal is very important for farmers, each of whom had one in the days before tractors and many even now, and would only sell it (for a large amount of money) when in the direst of straits. For this reason, perhaps, the carabao is the national animal of the Philippines (along with narra, or Burmese rosewood, the national tree; bangus, or milkfish, the national fish; and agila or haribon, or ‘monkey-eating’ eagle, the national bird). But Nana’s lady-boy third cousin, Rodel, adds that in other barangay whose patron saint is San Isidore, the patron saint of farmers, the carabao are made to kneel in front of the village church on their annual feast days. Both muddy animal and mudded people thus become supplicants for purification. Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood?

24

Japan But what is all this talk of the Japanese in Bibiclat? There are hints of Japan all over the countryside – a Japanese-Philippines Friendship Association has a building in a nearby town, karaoke machines and motor are Japanese, and occasionally you hear a bell, followed by a Japanese woman’s voice coming from a truck saying ‘Hidari/Migi ni magarimasu’ as the driver turns left or right. Other trucks are clearly also imported vehicles, as their signage declares: Chūō Cement, Daikō Express, Sagawa Kyūbin, Kyūshū Unsō, and sometimes just kabushiki kaisha (Co. Ltd.) with the rest whited out. But the Japanese were, of course, here in the war and there is still the occasional sign of that sojourn, too. In Bibiclat, Tuto – like every other villager – goes to draw drinking water for the house from a well built by the Japanese occupation forces. He says his father hid up a tree from the Japanese when they came to Bibiclat. Everyone else was running away and most of them were caught, but not Agapito (at least, not that day). The Japanese never looked above their heads. The villagers here are, perhaps not surprisingly, no lovers of the Japanese, who during the occupation used to raid their homes and steal what valuables they had. Many years after the war, when the local Catholic church was being renovated, builders digging the foundations behind it discovered a treasure trove of weapons, ammunition, grenades and so on, as well as jewellery and other valuables, buried in the ground. History doesn’t relate what happened to the weaponry, but the valuables were in large part restored to their owners. Another reason local people dislike the Japanese is because of they way they raped and killed local women. As one of Blessica’s classmates

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said about his mother, now passed away: ‘She was nineteen at the time and had to get married quickly. If you know what I mean’. Rape, of course, has been common wartime practice throughout history and all over the world. But the Japanese were not averse to systematically rounding up younger women and using them as ‘comfort women’ for their troops. It’s said that between 100,000 and 250,000 Asian women were captured and had to serve as sexual slaves during the war, and that only 30 per cent of them survived. I don’t know if any women from Bibiclat had to endure this terrifying indignity of being a ‘comfort woman’. Even if they did, I suspect that family modesty and shame would probably do their utmost to hide the truth – in the same way that nobody will admit to any bastard mestizo children being born in Bibiclat as a result of rape. The Japanese Government hasn’t yet bothered to apologise and make suitable reparations for its soldiers’ behaviour then. Indeed, it expressed ‘dismay’ a few years ago at the installation of a statue in Manila reminding people of the fact that approximately one thousand Filipina women were used as comfort women. Rather shockingly, but perhaps not surprisingly given Japan’s economic power, the statue has since been removed. After all my decades of living in Japan, and studying its society and culture, I still cannot understand, or accept, its government’s failure to deal with its wartime atrocities in many parts of Asia. And yet, Japan isn’t alone in this regard. In a journalistic account of travels in what he calls ‘Duterte’s Philippines’, the English journalist, Tom Sykes, remarks on Filipinos’ selective amnesia and how they like to recall some aspects of their history but not others. (Let’s face it, this is a characteristic of all nations that claim to have a ‘history’ in the first place.) Yes, as history books and media like to remind us, the Japanese raped, tortured, stabbed, shot and burned 100,000 civilians during the last weeks of their occupation of Manila (when the Americans fired 42,153 rockets at the city and totally destroyed it, killing four civilians for every six that the Japanese killed). But what about the PhilippineAmerican War between 1898 and 1902, when those who collaborated with the Americans were more or less the same families as those who did so with the Japanese in 1942; and when the final six months of wanton destruction of buildings, torture and executions were carried out on no less a scale than they were by the Japanese forty-three years later? And yet the USA’s ‘global white supremacy’ – like that of the British Empire – is portrayed as ‘humanitarian’, ‘democratic enlightenment’, the ‘saviour’ of the people, and so on.

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The one serious contribution to other Asian countries made by Japan’s ‘incursions’ in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, and, of course, mainland China during the period of the Second World War is this: Japan showed all these countries, hitherto ruled by Western powers (the USA, UK, Netherlands, France) that European and American colonialism was not a given. It was possible for an Asian nation, like Japan, to withstand its oppressors and take back control of its own country (and, of course, of others). In other words, for all its inequities, for all its brutality and destructiveness, occupation by the Japanese Imperial Army ignited in people living in all East and South-East Asian countries a belief in themselves and their own ways of life. Maybe it is this (if one is going to be at all charitable) that underpins the Japanese Government’s failure to apologise for its wartime transgressions? Somehow I doubt it. It’s certainly not a theory I’d like to defend for any length of time. So perhaps, instead, the Japanese Government’s attitude is based on an impervious belief in ‘soft power’ – in its country’s ability to win over its Asian neighbours by developing cultural products, and the technology accompanying them, whose appeal will make Koreans, Chinese of all kinds, Filipinos and others continue with their selective amnesia, and forget the past. This may work in the Philippines, if not in mainland China. The Filipinos, unlike Chinese, strike me as a very forgiving people in the first place. The idea of holding on to decades-old grudges doesn’t seem to appeal to them (even though they may be taught at school to do so) and it is only when asked questions at some length that some of them volunteer their dislike of Japan. After all, to hark back to another entry, planning involves a conception of longer-term time in the future that immediacy does not. This same timelessness, or chaos of the present, enables them to let the past be – a trait that other peoples, especially the British, might usefully learn and adopt. Nevertheless, local people here enjoy what they see as the benefits of Japanese technology and popular culture. Nana now owns, after all, a Japanese car; her TV set, fridge and rice cooker are all Japanesemade (or bear Japanese brand names). Both Tuto and JR ride Japanese motorbikes, although Tuto (perhaps to his credit) didn’t know that Honda was Japanese. I’ve seen several motor tricycles with their sidecars adorned in the dreaded colour of kawaii (cute) pink, and at least one sporting a Hello Kitty design, while one or two motorbikes are bedecked with the masked Kamen Rider cartoon character. There are several Japan Surplus furniture stores not far from here, one of which advertises and sells Fuchu Kagu (Fuchu Furniture);

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supermarkets display bags of Akide Komachi rice. Japanese products constitute a large part of consumerism in the Philippines, as they do in all other parts of Asia. Probably the most ubiquitous phenomenon in Japan’s push for soft power is the dreaded karaoke. For those who like to call it ‘curry-OK’, perhaps I should explain that kara is a Japanese word meaning ‘empty’, and that oke is an abbreviation of the English word ‘orchestra’. In other words, when you sing a karaoke song, you are singing along to orchestral backing. It’s as easy as that. Filipinos love to sing. I’ve already commented that they generally sing better than Japanese. This doesn’t make them automatic winners of Grammy Awards, though. At various stages during the Christmas and New Year celebrations, as well as at birthday parties and almost every Saturday evening after work, one or other of the residents of Bibiclat – including two of our neighbours – turns the volume up to max on a rented machine and encourages friends, relatives and neighbours to bellow out their favourite songs (thank Buddha, ‘My Way’ isn’t as popular here as it is in Japan). And although their voices are loud enough to shatter a balót duck’s egg at one hundred paces, it is their dissonance that is likely to have greater effect. I don’t know why, but, wherever I’ve been in the world, it has been those with the worst, out-of-tune, off-pitch voices who seem to be most addicted to karaoke. Japanese soft power has a lot to answer for!

Figure 24.1. Japanese furniture outlet, with Mitsubishi Xpander. © Brian Moeran.

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There is, however, a closer, more specific relationship between Bibiclat and the Japanese than the generalities I’ve so far provided, and it concerns the ‘mud festival’ (taong putik) held in the barangay on 24 June every year. There are two or three written partial accounts available on Google, as well as a commemoration plaque set beside a bronze statue just inside Bibiclat’s Catholic church gates. There are also the villagers’ own partial interpretations of what might, or might not, have happened well over sixty years ago. Like all oral ‘histories’, these interpretations often include other stories that do not at first seem directly relevant, but which, nonetheless, contribute to villagers’ sense of place. What follows, then, is my interpretation of the interpretations of those to whom I have talked, as well as of three written accounts. In November 1944, thirteen Japanese soldiers, led by one Captain Satō, were ambushed and killed by a group of USAFE guerrillas and local Bibiclat civilians. In revenge, the Japanese locked up all the men of the barangay in the local Catholic church, before selecting fourteen of them to face a firing squad – some say a machine gun – in front of all the women and children of the barangay. The men were led out of the church and lined up for execution. Before the order ‘Fire!’ was given, however, a torrential rainstorm struck the village. The execution was aborted and the Japanese left Bibiclat – some say, never to return. The men were saved. As to why a rainstorm should have prevented the firing squad from carrying out its duties remains unclear, but one shared explanation is that the torrential rain made their weapons unusable. People add that it also counteracted the Japanese soldiers’ belief in the Emperor as their sun god. The rain was an omen that they’d better heed. At this point, a bit of sympathetic magic comes into play. The fourteen condemned men’s escape from death was quickly attributed by the other villagers, as well – presumably – as by themselves, to a miracle wrought by St John the Baptist. After all, the element most closely associated with the village’s patron saint was water, and rain was water, ergo … Once recognised as being in command of potentially miraculous powers, San Juan Bautista, and the church dedicated to him in Bibiclat, became a pilgrimage site for those who were sick, or suffering from long-term or terminal illnesses, to beseech the help of the saint in curing them. As time went by, these supplicants began to cover themselves with mud and banana leaves on his saint’s day, in the belief that this somehow made them similar to the saint himself, since St John the Baptist is always portrayed in nothing more than a loincloth (a somewhat tenuous connection, but still…). This custom

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led to the formal establishment in 1990 of the annual ‘mud festival’ on San Juan Bautista’s saint’s day every year, when Bibiclat becomes awash with pilgrims. There are sufficiently numerous stories of illnesses being cured ‘as a result of’ a supplicant’s participation in the ‘mud festival’ for local people not to question their patron saint’s efficacy as a healer. Thanks to a rainstorm, therefore, Catholicism is seen by most villagers as the one and only religion that works. After all, it spectacularly overcame contenders to the throne of belief by proving itself stronger than Shintō, when with baptismal water it overcame the Japanese sun goddess. That, apart from the village water pump, is Japan’s longest lasting contribution to life in Bibiclat.

25

The Author of Life Who, or what, do you find sharing the road with you when you drive your car? Other vehicles, of course, of which most notably are the motor tricycles. But then there are children, adults, goats, chickens, dogs, ducks, all on the move in one direction or another, and rice grain spread out to dry. Of these only the last is in any way predictable, because it is lifeless. Where there’s life, there’s potential danger to other lives. Which is why, perhaps, one should pay heed to a sticker on the front windscreen of a local Aliaga-Cabanatuan bus: ‘The author of life is the Lord’.

26

Oh, George! I’ve been helping Marilou, Nana’s school friend who recently returned from a year in Saudi Arabia, where she worked as a nurse, prepare for an English test that she must take and pass if, as she is considering, she wants to work in the UK. During the course of our conversation one morning, she comments on superstitions among old people. One is that you should never sweep the floor of your house clean at night. To do so is to sweep out all your wealth, so if you’re caught doing it, you have to bring all the dirt and trash back into the house until daylight. Another is that, on New Year’s Eve, you should make sure that your rice, sugar, flour and other containers are chock-a-block full, since this will ensure that you have enough food in the coming year. A third is that, if somebody breaks a glass, plate or anything else during a wedding party, they must immediately break another one so that bad luck doesn’t affect the newly married couple. Over lunch, Blessica, Teté and Nana add that, when moving house, one must first of all leave water, rice, salt, candles and coins – but mostly water – in the new home to ensure that you (continue to) have food and money in your new life. The house also has to be blessed with water by the priest; neighbours come with coconut leaves which they wave around to get rid of bad spirits. Neighbours also give small gifts of a plate, or cup, or cooking fat. Teté has taken to hanging whole egg shells on the branch stumps of a withered tree in the garden. When I ask Nana why, she quickly reduces the curious foreigner to an annoying three-year-old child. ‘Why? Why? Why? Oh, George!’, she says in exasperation.

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But I guess all of us who go and live abroad for any length of time are reduced to being children, for a while at least. First, there is a language to be learned. Before any kind of fluency is reached, one has to stumble through basic sentences like a small child. And then there are the non-verbal forms of communication – the hand grasped to the brow for blessing, the eyebrows raised in greeting, the lips pouting to point out direction – and all the social norms to be learned, in the way that children assimilate them from their parents. The thing is that, as adults, we are expected to do everything in the space of a few weeks or months, not years. Oh, George, indeed!

27

OFWs I met Nana when she was working in Hong Kong as a domestic helper. Statistically she was then classified as an OFW, or Overseas Filipino Worker, and the contribution she and hundreds of thousands like her have made to the welfare of their families back home in the Philippines is inestimable. Just how many Filipinos (and Filipinas) go abroad to work is striking. In 2017, according to government statistics, their number came to 2.3 million (out of a total population of almost 105 million, and 100,000 more than in the previous year) – the vast majority working on contracts of one year or more. One fifth of this number came from Calabarzon, located east north east of Manila. Another 13 per cent (i.e. more than 300,000) were from Central Luzon, where Bibiclat is located. Still, this official number is probably less than one quarter of the actual number, estimated at more than ten million, or one tenth of the total population. The Philippines now ranks as one of the highest exporters of foreign labour in the world. Although we tend to think of Filipino workers in the UK and Hong Kong as being predominantly female, in fact men make up almost half of the OFW population. Those women who work abroad are for the most part in their mid-twenties and thirties. Most of them are married and have children when they leave the Philippines – over half of them headed for the Middle East. Three fifths of the women who go abroad to take up employment work in what the Philippines Government refers to as service and sales, and ‘elementary occupations’. Men are mainly employed as plant and machine operators and assemblers. Every one of these

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workers, it seems, remits a greater or lesser part of their salary back to their home country – on average, it is reckoned, 52,000 pesos (£865) a year per OFW. In the six months between April and September 2017, the amount sent home by OFWs, according to a Philippine Government website, amounted to P205.2 billion (approximately £3.4 billion), although studies by the Asian Development Bank suggest that overseas foreign workers’ remittances amount to more or less twelve per cent of the Philippines total annual GDP of £265 billion. I guess the question underlying all these statistics should be: are Filipinos driven abroad by what amounts to a systemic failure in the country’s domestic governance? Or do they participate willingly in a burgeoning remittance economy because they understand that the accumulation of foreign capital is the key to national social development? Various politicians have suggested that it is the latter question that motivates OFWs, who are seen as virtuous individuals voluntarily pursuing a vocation in an open, democratic labour market. It has even been suggested, by way of justification for this viewpoint, that they will enjoy religious transcendence in the afterlife, as well as the material and economic rewards afforded in this life by working overseas. Personally, I doubt whether many Filipinos who work abroad think very much about how the accumulation of foreign capital helps the development of the nation as a whole. The idea is too abstract for them. Nevertheless, the contributions OFWs make to their families’ welfare go well beyond monetary statistics, for the sacrifices they make are immense and unmeasurable. This is recognised back home in programmes like Biyahero (viaje, or travel, hero), compered by the openly gay wo/man, Vice Ganda, whose own mother was for a time an OFW. One of Nana’s elementary school classmates, Jhon Valerio, or JhonJhon, who lives in the next neighbourhood (purok) in Bibiclat, told me about how he had recently come back home after working in Saudi Arabia (Riyadh and Jeddah) for sixteen years. He first obtained a twoyear contract, through an agency which charged him the first month’s salary, but which arranged his employment contract, working visa and transportation to Saudi Arabia. He worked as an electrical engineer in a textile factory which manufactured, among other things, the material used in astro-turf (and the artificial lawn on which we were sitting as we talked).

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His first boss was German, but was then replaced by someone from the UK. He got on well with them both and was promoted, partly because he took the trouble to learn a bit of Arabic every night before he went to sleep in his dormitory. This enabled him to communicate more easily when out shopping in town, of course, but also to liaise with his Saudi co-workers, although these constituted a comparatively small percentage of the factory’s labour force. Of the 500 employed there, 150 were Filipinos (the largest group of foreign workers). Others included Pakistani, Indians, Bangladeshi and Indonesians. ‘The Filipinos, though, were the smartest’, he said proudly, tapping one temple with a lightly clenched fist. ‘The Bangladesh people were really bad. Ten of them equalled one Filipino. That’s why you find Filipinos all over the world. They’re very smart. When I left Jeddah after sixteen years, my boss said “Don’t go”. He even arranged for me to keep my residence card. “Don’t hand it back”, he said. “I’ll take care of it. Then you can come back and work here whenever you want”’. Jhon-Jhon then told me about how he used the money he earned to build himself the house where he now lives with his wife and two teenage children. He ‘met’ his wife on an Internet dating site. She is from a different part of the Philippines and was working in Singapore at the time. They used to exchange letters for several months before they ever met physically back in the Philippines, when they both had their annual two-week vacation at the same time. It was then that they decided to get married. ‘By this time, I had a house. But just a house. There was nothing in it. No beds. No furniture. No cooking or eating utensils. Nothing. So I went back to Saudi Arabia to earn more money to buy what we needed in the house’. He laughed. ‘I came back home again and we had one child. The next year another child. We needed more money for their clothes, their education, and so on, so I had to go back to Saudi Arabia again to work and save money for my family. Finally, I was able to come back home. But my two boys were already grown up teenagers. I didn’t know them at all. I’d been a good father materially by working hard and earning money. But spiritually…’. His voice tailed off. ‘I wasn’t a father at all to my children’. He brightened up again. ‘But now, I’m happy. My boys and I get on fine. I play basketball with them every day. I run a little store from the front of my land – fertiliser and agricultural supplies for the local farmers. I have a rice mill which I hire out. Yes, a rice mill. I bought it in Saudi Arabia and shipped it over. I get a little pocket money as an electrician and it’s enough. And I’ve saved enough for the boys to

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go to college in a few years’ time. Yes, I’m very happy. All those years abroad were worth it’. Another of Nana’s classmates and a close friend, Marilou or Malou, is a professional nurse. When we first met thirteen months ago, she was employed in a local hospital in Cabanatuan, but then, soon after, went to work for a year in a hospital in Najran, Saudi Arabia. She has just come back and is remarkably pale compared with her friends because, following Muslim traditions, she had to wear long sleeves and a head-scarf every day. She learned a few phrases in Arabic to use when comforting patients, but for the most part English was the working language used to communicate with the hospital doctors and other staff. Getting there in the first place was quite an exhausting journey. After flying to Jeddah, she then transferred onto a two-hour domestic flight to Abha, and from there was driven by car for another three hours to the city of Najran, close by the border with Yemen. After a couple of days’ rest and orientation about what to expect in her new job, she was driven out of the city for another two to three hours into the provinces. This was where she stayed for the whole year. There were about 100 Filipinos working in this provincial hospital – many as nurses, but just as many as pharmacists and technicians of one sort or another. Although there were some Saudi nurses, Malou dismissed them as being ‘very lazy’. The Indonesian nurses worked hard, as did most of the Indians, although the latter emitted a strong body odour because of their diet of curry and numerous spices. Her Saudi patients, too, were also smelly, though for a different reason: they didn’t wash properly. She wrinkled her nose in disgust as she told me this. ‘Filipinos are very clean’, she said proudly. ‘Our hospitals are cleaner, and we pay more attention to our patients’ cleanliness’. Although surrounded by fellow countrymen and women, Malou said that, first and foremost, she suffered from loneliness. ‘And the language’, she added. ‘Nobody told me before that it would help to learn Arabic’. Together with another nurse, she used to work three twelve-hour shifts in the gynaecology unit, helping pregnant women give birth, taking the babies when they came out of the womb (something she hadn’t done before), washing them, cutting their umbilical cords, and making sure all was well. She was surprised by the fact that new-born babies were fed within half an hour of birth; in the hospital in the

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Philippines where she’d worked before, they’d wait six hours before allowing mothers to breast feed their babies. She was accommodated in a dormitory very close to the hospital, and walked to and from work. Her three consecutive twelve-hour shifts were followed by two days off. Then it was her turn to cook for her room-mate and the two Filipina nurses in the next door room. ‘We worked out a system where the nurse off duty would cook for those on duty. In this way, we took it in turns to look after one another’. Otherwise, she said, she hardly ever went out. ‘Always working. But the salary was very good’. But what about her three teenage children? Didn’t she miss them? ‘Of course’, she sighed sadly. ‘But I still want to go abroad and work again. Filipina nurses are very good, you know, and are in great demand. So maybe I’ll go to Germany where they need us. Nana suggested that, and said it isn’t far from the UK, so I could go and visit you both there. But I don’t speak any German and it’s hard to learn a new language at my age. And when I’m there, I’m too busy to study or travel’. She smiled uncertainly. ‘So, maybe I should try to go to England. But I have to take the IL test. It’s in four parts – reading, writing, speaking, and… what’s the word? Comprehension. The last is difficult because the examiner asks you to talk about a topic you don’t know in advance. Like, “Tell me about a book you’ve read recently”. I’m not very good at that sort of thing and last time I failed the test. I got only 6.5 and the pass mark was 7.0. But I’ve heard that they’ve lowered the pass mark to 6.5 now, so maybe I can pass’. It transpires that the house in which Malou and her husband, Kambal, live isn’t their own, but belongs to one of her sisters, who went first to Japan, found work in the American naval base in Yokosuka, met and married an American there, and then moved to the US itself when the base was closed a few years back. Her other sister also went to work in Japan as a kindergarten teacher, and met and married another Filipino OFW there. They are still living and working in Japan. But they might come back to Bibiclat at any time, in which case Malou and Kambal would probably have to move out of her sister’s house. Since Kambal himself doesn’t want to go abroad to work, Marilou made the sacrifice and left her husband to look after the children while she was in Saudi Arabia. Now they’re trying to work

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out whether they have enough money to build the kind of house they want on a piece of land owned by Malou’s uncle. Daniel, another of Nana’s classmates, is still single. A tall, willowy man in his late forties, he came to Nana’s school classmates party two days before once again heading off on an eight-month contract as laundryman on a Bret Olson cruise ship. On return, he was due two months’ holiday before setting off again – usually from Southampton and then sailing round the Mediterranean or Baltic sea. He told me that all his expenses are paid, of course, from UK visa to air fare and travel allowances. This wasn’t so at the very beginning. He had to take a one-week training course in Manila, and pay for it himself. In it, among other things, he was taught bits of nautical English – like port and starboard, bow, midships and stern, galley, mess, gangway, and so on. ‘You always have to know exactly where you are when on board’, he said. ‘That’s partly in case of an emergency. But it’s also to help passengers who are lost. You must be able to direct them to where they want to go. One thing we were taught is never to say “no”’. After the training course, Daniel got his first job through an aunt whose husband was also working at sea, so the family connection was useful to get him started. These days he usually finds himself Figure 27.1. Kambal, the twin. © Brian Moeran.

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travelling with about thirty other crew members, both men and women. He shares a cabin with one other crew member down in the depths of the cruise ship, on Deck One, with eight more rising above him. But his cabin has its own shower and lavatory, so he’s quite satisfied with his accommodation. Once on board, though, he has no whole days off. ‘Every day is a Monday’, he laughs. ‘That’s what we say. But if the ship docks somewhere and I’m off duty, I’m allowed to go ashore in the evening. And then I spend all my money. Or I can go ashore in the morning, if I’m on night duty. And sometimes I’m on night duty for a whole month’. He gets out his mobile phone to show me a video of him dancing with some fellow crew members in front of the passengers. ‘The company asked us to do a couple of traditional Philippine dances. So we did. They paid us well for it. Fifteen hundred pesos (£25) each an evening’. Daniel has been doing this job for the past sixteen years and was laughingly described by his friends as ‘very rich’. For his part, Daniel jokingly described himself as a ‘one-day millionaire’ – earning money while at sea, but spending it all the moment his ship docked in a port. This, he said, was the peril for all those who worked at sea, and he had to make sure that he looked after members of his family properly. Still, he had to be well-off. When we met, he’d just bought Nana’s favourite car – a Toyota Innova! Daniel’s family is indeed one of the wealthier ones in the village, in large part because his father also spent many years abroad working as a sailor and remitting enough money back home for the family members to build a large four-bedroom house on the other side of the street from where Nana was born and brought up. Perhaps because his work takes him far afield for months at a time, Daniel isn’t married – which partly explains why his friends regard him as so well off. He’s got no wife or children to provide for. Malou and Nana have decided that they should somehow find him a wife – a young woman from somewhere far away, like Mindanao, so she can’t run away easily when she finds out that she doesn’t like her husband! At this point in the conversation, Daniel himself turned to me and said: ‘You notice, I’m not saying anything’. All the same, though, he said he’d like to have children. ‘And when they’re born, Malou and I are going to be godmothers’, said Nana, clapping her hands joyfully. ‘And you can be their godfather’, said Daniel, turning to me. ‘Would you be that for me?’

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I thanked him for the kind offer and promised I’d do my best to live long enough to be of use to his future children. But first he has to find a wife. Nana herself spent eleven years in Hong Kong. After leaving school, she went – like, it seems, half the population of the Philippines – to work in Manila, and found a temporary job in a garment factory where two of her older sisters, Blessica and Viola, were also working. Later she found more permanent employment in a different factory, but after three years it was hit by a recession, and she continued her employment on six-monthly contracts. Tired of the uncertainty, she decided to go and work abroad, and applied to an agency for a job as a domestic helper in Hong Kong. There was a reason for this, other than her current job uncertainty. Her parents’ house in Bibiclat was in an awful state; every time it rained, they had to place buckets all over the floor to catch the water that leaked through both the corrugated metal and thatched parts of the roof. Nana wanted to help her parents repair their family home, and the only way she could realistically save enough money to do this was by working abroad. So, off she went to Hong Kong, placed by the agency with a Chinese family. In fact, she only had an elderly woman to look after and the job wasn’t too stressful – perhaps just as well for a young Filipina who had never been abroad before, and who needed to acclimatise to a totally new world of high-rise apartment blocks, multi-generation Chinese families, traffic noise and pollution (the last two, however, being very much a part of her previous life in Manila). She learned how to cook Chinese food, and followed a strict schedule from morning to night in her new job. But she wasn’t properly fed. The old lady she worked for told her to eat the by then tasteless vegetables she’d used to make Chinese broths, and allowed her little else. Nana was at first extremely lonely in her job, but, to its credit, her agency had anticipated this. Before she left Manila, she went through a kind of induction programme with half a dozen other women due to work as domestic helpers in Hong Kong. For a couple of days and nights, they all stayed in a house owned by the agency and, while learning the tricks of their new trade, got to know one another. They then flew together to Hong Kong. This meant that, once they’d arrived, they had somebody they knew who they could meet up with on their days off. In this way, the women could console one another over the difficulties they faced with their employers, and help one another out with advice based on their own experiences.

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After two years, she was let go by her employer – not because the old lady disliked Nana, but because, like all Chinese employers, she didn’t want to pay her domestic helper the higher wage (a mere £20 a month increase) demanded by Hong Kong Government regulations. Nana should have returned home to the Philippines at the end of her contract, but fortunately she found a new Chinese employer who managed to persuade the immigration authorities to let her stay on without leaving the territory. Unlike many Filipinas working for Chinese families, Nana was treated comparatively well by her employers. I suspect that this was in large part because neither of them had young children for her to look after, so that she had a room of her own, and didn’t have to sleep on the floor in a children’s bedroom, as many Filipinas do. She sent back a proportion of her wages every month to her parents, who were able to get a new roof and carry out other repairs on their house back in Bibiclat. Nevertheless, when her mother was suddenly taken ill, Nana’s employers refused to allow her to go back to the Philippines. If she did, they said, her contract would be ended. And once a contract is terminated by an employer, a domestic helper from abroad is never allowed back into Hong Kong to work again. So Nana had to stay and suffer the misery of not being with her mother when she died. To this day, her eyes well up with tears when she remembers that period of her life. Her father died a couple of years later. This time, however, her new employers allowed her to return home, although Nana had to pay her own air fare and forfeited her salary while she was away. It was after that that she decided to build her own house in Bibiclat, even though she’d inherited the family home. So, a year or two before I met her, Nana persuaded her niece, Gianna, who had just started studying architecture Figure 27.2. Nana (rt), with fellow OFW friends in Hong Kong. © Brian Moeran.

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at university, to draw up plans for a house. Gianna’s mother, Viola had said her youngest sister could build her house on a piece of land she owned near the old family home. So Gianna designed a house for her aunt, but kept having to change the plans as Nana decided that she wanted two floors, not one; then three bedrooms, not two. In the meantime, Nana had found a new job and moved to Mui Wo, a quiet township with half a dozen connected villages on the southern part of Lantau Island, a forty-five-minute ferry ride from Central on Hong Kong Island. Her employers were French, and took Nana on because the wife was about to give birth to their first child. So Nana found herself acting as surrogate mother when Louise was born, looking after her day and sometimes night, six days a week, for a couple of years, at which time her French employer’s second child, Zoë, was born. For the next four years, Nana ran the entire household and, of course, given that she had no children of her own, became extremely attached to Loulou and Zoë. By the time we met in early January 2016, the skeleton of the house was done and Nana was seriously in debt. She’d borrowed £5,000 from her employers and was paying this sum back by working at overtime rates on Sundays (so that she rarely, if ever, had a day off); and she’d borrowed a further £4,000 from a Philippines finance company, which obliged her to pay back £370 from her monthly salary of £450. These loans enabled her to put up the shell of a house, but she had run out of money and was at an impasse, unable to pay cash for more materials and work because of the debt – a debt that she’d resigned herself to renewing once she’d paid off what she currently owed. Like Jhon-Jhon, it looked as if she’d have to carry on working in Hong Kong for another decade if she were ever going to finish the house, have floor tiles and windows installed, the walls painted, and then furnished with kitchen equipment, beds, dining table, and so on. It was about then that I appeared on the horizon and was able to help – at first, purely out of charity. I was so impressed by this selfless, good-humoured and hardworking Filipina that I decided to make 2016 my ‘Help a Filipina Year’. I had no intention of entering a serious relationship with Nana – after all, I knew next to nothing about the Philippines, and felt far more comfortable in more northern parts of East Asia – but the best laid schemes, or lack thereof, as is so often the case, ‘gang aft aglay’. So, here we are. Nana, who had been looking after her two French girls from their birth until they were six and four, decided to finish her contract at the end of November 2018 and come back to Bibiclat. And I joined her here a few weeks later.

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Finding and getting married to a foreign, Western man is one ‘career choice’ available to every female OFW when she’s working abroad. Usually, it’s the woman who marries a foreign man, rather than the other way around – something which reveals a lot, I think, about women’s flexibility when compared with men’s. In Mui Wo, I met a handful of Filipina women in Nana’s circle of friends who had met and either married, or were in a long-term relationship with, Caucasian men (from France, England and the US). These Filipina women dedicated themselves to their husbands’ welfare and in return lived comfortable lives, undreamed of back home in some remote part of the country. One Englishman, who hadn’t married his girlfriend, Nana’s closest friend in Hong Kong, was paying for the living expenses and schooling of her children by a former Filipino husband. There are, however, other ways of finding a partner while working abroad. Christian, who is in his mid-fifties and who, in recent weeks, has taken to coming to the house almost every evening, when he talks earnestly to his old school classmate, Blessica (and occasionally serenades her with songs on his guitar), met his Filipina wife while they were both working abroad in Saudi Arabia. After twenty years, they still lived there together – she, like Malou, working as a nurse; he as ‘production engineer’ in the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defence, until he was released a few weeks ago. All three of their children were born in Saudi Arabia, but the parents sent them back to be looked after by Christian’s unmarried sister living in nearby Aurora when they reached elementary school age, while they continued to work in the Middle East. He’s here now to be with his mother and children. Christian has openly talked about the ‘sacrifice’ that he and his wife have made on behalf of ‘the family’. It’s a concept I’ve already begun to think explains aspects of Philippine society that I’m witnessing here. ‘Family is everything’, Christian asserted one evening during a rather drunken gathering. ‘I’ve learned to speak Arabic quite fluently, although I can’t read it. And then I was trusted enough by Arabs to be employed in the Defence Ministry. I had a good job. It was well paid. I could look after everyone in my family – my mother who is 94 years old – yes, ninety-four and still fine up here’. He tapped one temple of his forehead. ‘No Alzheimer’s. Nothing. And I, of course, look after my children, who are now finishing tertiary education. I’ve built a house for my sister who looked after them in Aurora. I’ve achieved all this. The sacrifice that my wife and I have made, though, is that we haven’t been there to bring up our children. That’s our destiny’.

28

Of Cocks and Men A cockerel and its hen arrived in our compound soon after I arrived. It transpires that they belong to Tuto who thought our large compound better than his own very small one, so he brought them over here. One day, a few weeks back, a friend brought over his white cockerel and soon the two men were holding what I eventually realised weren’t just chickens, but their fighting cocks face to face, encouraging them to do battle. They then put them on the ground and left the two birds to fight it out. This they did, though somewhat half-heartedly, leaping into the air with their chests out, trying to knock the other down in a flurry of wings and feathers. Tuto’s bird got the better of its visitor after a minute or two, and the two men quickly picked them up and nursed them gently in their arms. ‘10,000 pesos!’, laughed my brother-in-law in his customary selfdeprecatory manner that is designed to contradict his words. ‘Win. Ten thou-saand pesos!’ He laughed again, as though the likelihood of this happening was as remote as his being able to drive a car in Manila without having an accident every few days. Still, for several weeks now, whenever the red and black cockerel, Tuto, and I have all been present in one another’s fields of vision, he has declared with a laugh ‘Ten thousaand pesos!’ This was the sum he loudly claimed should be his when he was adjudged to have won the Aquinez family’s dance during the New Year’s Eve party. Amid much laughter he was given just 100 pesos (and was very happy)! Eventually I gathered that he hoped to enter his handsome black and red bird in an annual cockfight competition in Bibiclat in the early

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summer. Cockfights here seem to be quite well organised – in the sense that they take place in arenas, or ‘cockpits’, with tiered seats under a covering roof. There’s a disused arena on the edge of Aliaga, to which locals used to repair on market days, before it was closed down by the mayor. Once a new mayor was elected in May, however (a month after I left Bibiclat), its owner – who was one of his supporters – quickly got his licence back. In the meantime, a new cockpit, called the Alejandra Coliseum, was built by the old Aliaga mayor some way out of town on the road to Santiago (this side of Zaragoza, which isn’t that far from Concepción, Dolores, Angeles, Mexico and San Fernando. Don’t you love these Spanish names!). But it wasn’t finished in time for him to give himself a licence, and the new mayor has refused to do so. This is the kind of tit for tat that’s typical, it seems, of politics here, as mayors all over the country (except in Manila) have the power to license cockpit arenas and make themselves some money in the process. How often and where cockfights take place, I’ve no idea. JR has suggested it could be as often as once a week – something confirmed by Julius, Joy and the workers painting the house. Cockfights are legal, provided they’re held in stipulated arenas – they must be, to have such grand constructions with car and tricycle parking space allocated to them. But they can also take place illegally. Only a few days ago, Tuto told me there might be a cockfight in Bibiclat that coming Sunday. It all depended on whether residents of the neighbouring barangay turned up with their roosters (in the event, they didn’t). But still, he was nervous about my being there because the police just might get wind of it, turn up and arrest me along with other locals. This made me quite excited. After all, if I could recount the same sort of tale that Clifford Geertz did of his first cockfight in Bali (surely, the best-known article ever written by an anthropologist) – also illegal, also village based, also subjected to a sudden police raid – surely I’d finally become famous! But I didn’t bother to try to explain all this to Tuto, who wouldn’t have understood either my English or my premises for wanting to participate as a spectator. Instead, I told him that, if the police did come, we could run either to his house or to Nana’s, whichever was the closer, sit down and talk about circumcision. The police would probably want to add their own stories of how they lost their foreskins and the cockfight raid would be forgotten. If I didn’t know when, where, or how often cockfights took place, I had no idea either what a cockfight consists of, or for how long it lasts. JR has told me that the big ones go on from nine to five, but that many are shorter and are held in an afternoon. A lot depends on who turns up with his cock and is ready to fight. Nor did I know how many

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cocks are entered in a competition; nor if a cock had – or was able – to endure more than a single fight. This made it hard to work out how a tournament ‘winner’ could be declared, until Tuto and JR mentioned something about a ‘four-cock derby’, where each man has four cocks and has them fight three other men with four cocks each. Apparently, the winner of this round-robin can earn P10,000 prize money from his backers aided, possibly, by the arena owner. Given the lack of clear communication with Nana and her family members and their somewhat disjointed explanations of what may or may not go on during a cockfight and where one might take place and when, I spent three or four days on my computer, scouring the Internet, and making use of university library resources to which I have access, to discover more. Apart from Geertz’s description of the cockfight in Bali, I read another excellent one by Scott Guggenheim on cockfights in the north of Luzon. I also learned that the cockfight is one of the oldest and most widely distributed traditional sports known to humanity, the earliest recorded one taking place in China in 517 bc. Indian cockfighting is mentioned in the Kama Sutra (third century ad), and our farmyard cock itself probably originated in southeast Asia, before travelling the world, mutating and becoming our supermarket chicken. In fact, the fighting cock seems to have crossed the world in two directions: one, westwards through India, Iran, Greece, Rome and Western Europe more generally, before ending up in the Caribbean (including Cuba and Puerto Rico); the other via several Pacific islands (one of them Tahiti) to the west coast of the Americas. In England, cockfights were held regularly until the middle of the nineteenth century. William Hogarth depicted a cock in an etching in 1759, and a cockerel is the emblem of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. By chance, I came across an old cockpit outside the Goodwood estate in Sussex a few months after I left Bibiclat. Although in most, but not all countries, cockfighting is now banned outright or takes place in slightly murky legal conditions, its transnational reach can be seen in the remarkable range of gamecock breeds that mention one country or another in their names. There are the Asil cock from south Asia; the Malay, Japanese (or Jap), and other native ‘Oriental’ (Thai, Shamo, Cohin China and Shanghai) cocks. In the United States, we find the Wisconsin Shuffler, Jersey NubComb, Delaware Dominic, Virginia Grey, Kentucky Warhorse and Susquehanna Red. The rest of the Americas boasts such strains as the Mexican hen, the Peruvian and the Red Cuban cock. In Europe, there are Pyles Old English, the Dorking and the Windsor in England, and

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the Irish Gilder, Irish Piles and Wild Irish in Ireland. And then, of course, there’s the Gallic Rooster or gallus gallicus (think of French rugby, football fans and players’ jerseys). Talking of which, gallus conveniently rhymes with phallus – enough to encourage one folklorist, Alan Dundes, to describe the cockfight as ‘an all-male preserve in which one male demonstrates his virility, his masculinity, at the expense of a male opponent’. In this, he continued, it is like American football and the Spanish bullfight, where maleness is proved by feminising the opponent, usually through penetration. In Andalusia, an especially aggressive cock is said to ‘have balls’ – which biologically it does have, although invisible because they’re inside its body. Ironically, however, it doesn’t have a cock, despite its seemingly insatiable appetite for sex. Maybe this explains why, throughout the world, frequent allusions to courtship, marriage and mounting are found in descriptions of cockfights and what should, and should not, be done before and after battle. Dundes goes on to suggest that ‘the cockfight is a homoerotic male battle with masturbatory nuances’ and, making use of analyses by psychoanalysts, proceeds to link masturbation with the betting that takes place at every cockfight. Breathless stuff! But does it hold true for the Philippines? After all, nobody yet among Nana’s siblings has started telling me about the close link between Tuto’s rooster and his pututoi of circumcision fame. The same Tagalog word isn’t used for both. And yet one writer of a Filipino cockfighting manual back in the early 1960s has argued that sex and gameness complement each other and that ‘no other sport has as much connection with sex as cockfighting’. I’m not entirely convinced. Certainly, cockfights here are primarily a male thing, witnessed almost (but not quite) entirely by men who gather round and bet on the outcome of each fight, in what is clearly a time-honoured tradition. Popular common lore has suggested that cockfighting in the Philippines was initiated by the Spanish. This isn’t so. It was in fact already in existence when Magellan first landed in 1521 on his ‘voyage of discovery’ around the world, as we know from observations made by his Italian chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta. Cockfights in the Philippines were officially recorded after the islands became a Spanish colony from 1565. It is from this time that they became a sociological (as opposed to folkloric) phenomenon. One way the new Spanish conquerors sought to organise their new subjects into manageable communities – other than through the introduction of wet-rice agriculture – was by setting up permanent, privately-owned cockpits as a means of gathering people into what

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would become population centres. Later on, the government started auctioning off cockpit licences to the highest bidders as a (successful) way of increasing revenues. In rural parts of the colony, cockfighting became the symbol by which emergent mestizo landlords and shop owners displayed their newly acquired social position. Later on still, from around the mid-1890s, cockpits provided secure cover for rebels who began plotting against the Spanish in preparation for what became the Philippine Revolution (1896–1898). In other words, cockfights aren’t simply fights between cocks. Like all games and forms of material culture, they are cultural performances which engender social formations as they bring all kinds of different people together – people with different interests who jostle for power (by means of regulation, money and ideologies of one sort or another). At the same time, cockfights become the focus of moral imperatives and the means by which such moralities are realised. When the Philippines became a territory of the United States after the latter’s victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War, two competing ideologies came up against each other. On the one hand, there were the Philippine cockfighting enthusiasts who were cultural nationalists and defended their right to fight as a path to citizenship and self-determination. On the other, there were the Americans, in particular American Protestant priests, who were against cockfighting and went so far as to harangue the local populace beforehand, proclaiming that their new empire was one of benevolence, moral uplift and animal kindness, and thus different from old forms of imperialism practised by the Spanish. Not unnaturally, some Filipinos regarded this as imperialism by another name! But what is a cockfight? What is Tuto going to do with his rooster in order to earn 10,000 pesos? Fighting cocks are naturally aggressive. They’ll peck at any bird that comes near them, as the neighbour’s rooster discovered very quickly when it decided to fly over the wall and land in Nana’s garden. Tuto, who was there at the time, planting chillies, watched his bird go for the intruder with flailing wings and soon separated them, with the neighbour’s bird very much the worse for wear. Undaunted, though, a day later it flew back over the wall separating the two properties and found itself quickly involved in a return fight. Tuto was there once again to separate them. When the neighbour’s rooster decided to come over the wall a third time, Tuto picked it up, wrung its neck, and took it home for dinner. Several weeks later, when the house is awash with workers painting and tiling the exterior and upstairs bedrooms, Tuto suddenly finds

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himself involved in a friendly cockfight with two of his colleagues. Without my noticing, the splendidly moustachioed tiler, Boshio, and six-foot tall painter, Joy (don’t ask me why he has a girl’s name; he’s no lady-boy), have both brought their cocks with them in their tricycle sidecars, and the three men decide to pit their birds against one another after work on a Saturday evening, at the end of the working week. Julius produces a couple of foam rubber tarét, used in place of knife-edge gaffs, and ties them to the legs of Tuto’s cock, before doing the same with Boshio’s. Both men, who have been cradling their cocks in their arms as if they were babies, then quickly push them forward beak to beak before letting them loose on the ground. The ‘hackles’ of both birds immediately rise, and within a few seconds, they leap into the air and attack each other, before falling to the ground in a bundle of pecking feathers. They fly up once more, roll over on the ground, with Tuto’s cock definitely getting the advantage as it bestrides its opponent and viciously pecks at its wing and head. The two men, who’ve been circling round their birds, ready to intervene when matters get out of hand, immediately step in and separate their birds which, once again, they cradle lovingly in their arms and – in Tuto’s case aided with some spittle aimed unerringly at his rooster’s head (a trick Nana says he learned from his father) – soothingly stroke their heads and wings. Next it’s the turn of Boshio’s bird to joust with Joy’s – a large white rooster that strikes me as pretty powerful. And so it turns out. Boshio’s

Figure 28.1. An impromptu cockfight. © Brian Moeran.

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cock is no match for this monster, and now it is Tuto’s turn. This time the two birds are more evenly matched, and the fight continues for well over a minute as each tries to destroy the other, with Joy’s cock pecking furiously at Tuto’s bird’s wing, while Tuto’s bird more effectively aims at its opponent’s face and strikes home several times. There’s plenty of laughter among the onlookers – Nana, Blessica, and three other workers – and the contest is declared a draw. This makes sense. These men are co-workers and friends. It wouldn’t do for one of them to be singled out as a winner. Nevertheless, for the first time, I can see a glimmer of hope for my brother-in-law’s 10,000 pesos. In fact, though, as I eventually learn, Tuto’s much vaunted 10,000 pesos won’t come from prize money as such, but from how much money is bet on his cock when it finally enters the cockpit. So, while a cockfight may involve two birds fighting to the death and thus singling out a winner, the real interest is in betting on that winner. Who bets, then? So far as I can make out – and here I’ve been helped by reading Scott Guggenheim’s and Clifford Geertz’s accounts of Filipino and Balinese cockfights – there are two betting systems at work at any cockfight. One involves the owners of the two cocks set to fight each other, together with two groups of their friends and family members

Figure 28.2. Boshio, the tiler. © Brian Moeran.

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(barkada), who lay a combined bet at particular odds on which cock is going to win. The winner gets the amount bet by the loser’s group, with a 20 per cent commission split between the referee (sentensyador) and arena owner, plus a winner’s tip if he feels so inclined. No prize money as such is on offer. The other betting system involves spectators, who bet either against a bookie (known as a kristo) who offers odds on each of the cocks about to fight, or – through the bookie – against one another. These, then, are individual bets – at odds agreed between the two parties involved – that have nothing to do with the central bet, although the size of the latter may influence odds and how much individuals are prepared to wager on each fight. The fact that there isn’t any prize money, but that a cock owner’s financial aspirations depend entirely on how much is bet by the two participants and their coteries, means – as Tuto finally admits – that his much vaunted 10,000 pesos may in fact be only 5,000, or maybe a mere 2,000 pesos! It all depends. But how is Tuto going to find a competitor? Apparently, he needs to go with his rooster to a cockpit on a day fights are held and then find someone else there with a cock of more or less the same weight in order to be able to enter a fight. Rule number one seems to be that Figure 28.3. Individual betting at the World Slasher Cup. © Brian Moeran.

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weight decides which cocks are pitted against each other. Then he’ll have to follow other rules of that particular competition about how the birds should fight. Should they be bare-heeled? Have rubber pads placed on their leg-spurs? Or metal gaffs (slender, pointed spurs)? Or knives (known, rather ominously, as ‘slashers’)? Not surprisingly, fights where birds are bare heeled or fitted with rubber pads last much longer than when they attack each other with knives or gaffs – in which case they’re engaged in a fight to the death. But how do you know who’s won when both birds are still alive and pecking? Tuto tells me that the decision of the referee, or sentensyador (literally, ‘the one who passes sentence’), is final. After the initial flurry of wings, chests, feathers and sharply taloned feet, the birds usually collapse on the ground, with one or both wounded. The sentensyador will pick both cocks up, hold them under each arm and place them beak to beak. If both birds are still eager to fight, he’ll place them on the ground and let them attack each other again. If one is clearly reticent, he’ll declare the other the winner. All this information, however, is hearsay. I need first-hand experience of what goes on. The idea of witnessing a cockfight intrigues me, even though I’m sure it will be bloody and unpleasant. After all, as I mentioned earlier, it’s the subject of one of the most famous essays in anthropology, ‘Notes on a Balinese Cockfight’, written by the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, back in the early 1970s. My chance to see a real cockfight comes unexpectedly and rather suddenly. While looking up stuff to read about cockfights in the Philippines, I came across something called the ‘World Slasher Cup’, an annual international cockfight competition held in the Smart Araneta Coliseum, itself located in Quezon City (the northern part of Metro-Manila). As I went through various web pages, I realised that the WSC was in progress right then and that the ‘grand finals’ were to be held the following day. This was too good a chance to miss. After her initial astonishment that I intended to drive to Manila the following morning, Nana got hold of ‘the twin’, Kambal, and quickly persuaded him to go with me. So, the next morning, not too early, we set out for what my Japanese friends would, in this case quite correctly, call ‘the big shitty’. Kambal and I agreed that I would start the – by an optimistic reckoning – three-hour drive, and that he’d take over at the last motorway services before we hit Metro Manila. Although the cockfight finals were due to start at midday, they were likely to go on until four in the morning, according to the website, so there seemed little point in arriving too early.

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All went to plan until, rather suddenly, we ran into the inevitable traffic jam and found ourselves crawling along at little more than three miles an hour. I could hear the sound of a wailing siren behind us, getting slowly closer and closer, and then saw two police vehicles weaving their way between the Xpander and a car in the middle lane. In a flash, Kambal shifted gears, pulled out into the gap left by the police car and van, and followed them. For almost two kilometres we weaved in and out of stationary cars and trucks as part of this speeding police cavalcade. By the time another car driver had grown wise to our false colours and blocked our way, we’d managed to get through most of that particular traffic jam, and were able to turn off without further trouble onto another main artery leading to Quezon City and the ‘smart’ Coliseum. So far, so good. Kambal and I exchanged high fives, accompanied by our usual refrain of ‘Only in the Philippines!’ To prove his point, he then decided to drive along the bus and taxi lanes, rather than move far more slowly in the other lanes reserved for private vehicle traffic. This went nicely, and I was just beginning to think that we might even arrive at the Coliseum more or less on time, when a blue uniformed ‘policeman’ stepped out in front of a bus and signalled to us to stop. Kambal started cursing as he pulled the Xpander over to the side of the road and, under direction, turned into a side road. There, the policeman brought out his ticket pad and prepared to write out a fine. What had we done? Driven a few hundred metres in the bus lane? No, our number plate ended with the number 65, and that meant that we weren’t allowed to drive in Manila on Wednesdays between seven in the morning and eight in the evening. And today was Wednesday, so my driver was obliged to pay a fine to some government office or other right in the centre of the city, right now. Kambal lost his customary bravado in the face of the law and counter-argued politely. The policeman responded, equally politely. It transpired that he wasn’t in fact a traffic policeman at all, but an ‘LTO’ (Land Transportation Officer) with very sharp eyesight, employed to spot offending car number plates on the move and stop them. He had a job to do, and he should do it properly. The ticket pad hovered ominously by the driver’s window. I then tried the ‘I’m a university professor conducting research’ act, and this was the only day I could witness an important Philippine cultural event. Kambal said a few more things in a conciliatory tone and, eventually, with a show of reluctance, the LTO, who had stepped round the front of the car to the passenger window when I started

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my explanation, handed me a folded sheet of paper. I opened it and started to read something about Manila immigration. My confusion obviously began to show for Kambal said in a quiet voice: ‘Put one thousand pesos in the paper. Fold it. Give it back. Then OK’. So I paid my first ever bribe, and we drove on, nervous that we might be stopped again on any street corner by another sharp-eyed LTO. Fortunately, we made it to the Coliseum (which I would never have found on my own) without further hindrance, parked the car, and went in search of tickets for the WSC. The ticket office was closed. A security guard nearby told us that the cockfights didn’t begin until three in the afternoon and that the box office would open at 1.30 pm – or maybe after two. So off we went for a stroll in the shopping malls surrounding the Smart Araneta Coliseum before having a Pizza Hut lunch – the novelty of the ‘big shitty’ inspiring us to eat food whose ingredients were no doubt of equally dubious provenance. In due course, we went back to the Coliseum, bought tickets (at 1,800 pesos, or £30, each), and went in. For all the idea of its being ‘smart’, the Araneta Coliseum struck me as being pretty run-down. It may have hosted the ‘Thriller in Manila’, when Joe Frazier lost to Mohammed Ali back in 1975; it may have provided the venue for numerous pop star concerts from Michael Jackson and Elton John to Lady Gaga and Kylie Minogue, as well as the annual Binibining Pilipinas Beauty Pageant, but the fact that it was constructed back in 1960 (when it was the largest covered dome in the world) meant that seating was hardly state of the art, in spite of occasional renovations over the years. Anyway, in we went, to find that we could sit virtually anywhere we liked. There were hardly 500 spectators present. So we chose a row of seats above the pit and I started writing notes on everything and everyone I noticed around me. After a quarter of an hour or so, three or four men in white shirts and dark trousers entered the ring to announce the grand finals of the World Slasher Competition. I then realised – thanks to the big screens here and there – that two of the men were carrying cocks and that I’d better start paying more attention to what was going on in the ring, as well as outside it. But what to make of a sport that I’d never had a chance to witness? It’s happened before in my life, of course. Back in October 1967, when I first went to Japan via Siberia, as our Soviet ship heaved to and fro in Yokohama harbour, battered by the tail end of a second typhoon in two days, I watched sumō wrestling and wondered at both the size and nakedness of a people I was about to live among for five years.

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Eventually, with some help from friends and neighbours, I came to grasp the rules and art of sumō wrestling. Between tournaments (which I followed avidly on TV), I engaged in a new kind of mental wrestling, as I tried to work out how professional baseball was played during a nightly diet of games involving the Hanshin Tigers (of whom I have remained a lifelong fan), the Chunichi Dragons (my former fatherin-law’s favourite team), and Yomiuri Giants (a team which most people I knew outside of Tokyo detested). Many years later, during a visit to UC Berkeley, I managed to learn all about American football and ardently supported Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers, as they sped to victory over Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins in the Superbowl in late January the following year. But the cockfight? What was going on, other than the fact that a couple of game cocks were being set to fight each other and, during the course of a minute or less, one of them died or was mortally wounded – pecked to death and cut to ribbons by razor-sharp knives that were three or four inches long, and attached to the back of their legs? While there could be – as in a bull fight – a certain ephemeral beauty in the way in which the birds flew up into the air and rushed at each other with chests out, the savageness of this fight to the death, together with the fact that it seemed to amount to little more than a multitude of wagers won or lost by the spectators, made an outside observer such as myself wonder at the ethics of death caused by such seemingly misplaced passion. And what about the betting and its two systems? Who on earth was betting how much with and/or against whom on which cock? Before each fight, there was a sudden hubbub of noise and waving in the air of hands with fingers fluttering, as spectators, with the help of bookies (or kristo), placed bets against one another on the result of the fight. Kambal and I suddenly found ourselves terrified of gesticulating while we talked to each other, or even of scratching our noses, in case our hand signals were mistaken for bets of thousands of pesos without our being aware of it! I asked him if he’d any idea what was going on, but he shook his head. ‘This my first time cockfight’, he laughed, while managing to retain his ‘cool dude’ appearance. Still, he was soon slouched in his seat, displaying a look of bored, but stoic, patience as he contemplated the long afternoon, evening, and perhaps night, ahead of us. I tried to get him to ask a nearby spectator what was going on, but it transpired that my would-be informant was an initiate, too. Realising that,

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anyway, Kambal’s English wasn’t up to interpreting, I looked around in desperation. It was then that I spotted a Caucasian face a few rows behind us, off to one side, drinking a can of beer, so I told Kambal I was going over to ask him some questions. We moved across and I introduced myself, saying that I was from Ireland (a ploy which almost always works far better than admitting to being English), and doing anthropological research. The Irish touch worked once again – as it often does with Americans. ‘You’re Irish, you say? Well, my name’s Murphy – Mike Murphy – so I guess we could be related. It’s a small country!’ My interlocutor laughed, pointing to the seat beside him, and taking another swig of his – Philippine, not Irish – beer. ‘Take a seat. I’ve got all the beer I need here’, he kicked at a polystyrene box at his feet, ‘So I’m not goin’ anywhere. And we got all day and night, so fire away!’ he said. ‘I’ve been coming here since 2009, so I can probably help a bit’. And help he did. Over the next six hours, Mike patiently answered my questions about what was going on, and filled me in on his own part in the competition. He’d entered two cocks on the first day, but met with some really stiff competition and didn’t get through the elimination round. He’d done better in the past, but not this year. ‘I came up against a bunch of heavy fuckers. Jeez! They were all there on the first day. The top breeders’. He reeled off a couple of Filipino names. ‘Next year, I’m going to enter the second day, not the first. I can tell you’. He also told me that he was from near Salt Lake City in Utah, where he raises ‘chickens’ (his word). A couple of dozen he ships over to a farm about an hour’s plane ride south of Manila where the Filipino manager there (who later joined us) takes care of them. They’re seven months old at the time and are reared for at least two more years to get them ready for cockfighting. They’re fed nourishing food, kept in idyllic surroundings, and generally have a good life as they’re fattened up and strengthened for fighting. Ideally, cocks should then be about three years old and somewhere around two kilograms in weight. It’s possible to have them fighting when younger – at, say, ten and a half months – but then they’d have to face ‘chickens’ (Mike’s word again) of the same age. Later, after one fight came to a speedy end, he chuckled: ‘Dead in thirty seconds. But it had a pampered life for three years. A darn sight better than your average battery hen’.

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Cockfighting isn’t legal in a lot of states in the USA, but Americans have been breeding cocks and selling them abroad at good prices for many years. They’ve also been participating in cockfights in the Philippines and elsewhere where they’re legal, although, as a foreigner, Mike cannot rear more than a couple of dozen cocks here, whereas some of his Philippine competitors can pick and choose from as many as 2,500 birds. So he doesn’t really stand much hope of winning a competition like this, where he’s up against the best of the best. Breeding gamecocks, then, is big business in the Philippines and tends to be dominated by politicians and other social ‘heavies’, who sell their winning birds to sire lines of potential future champions. One contestant, going under the name of Thunderbird, is part of the Araneta family, which owns the Coliseum in which we’re sitting, as well as all the properties and shopping malls around it. ‘He’s got the biggest, the most expensive chicken farm in the whole fuckin’ world’, Mike added. ‘Eight acres of prime real estate devoted to breeding cocks, and it’s just around the corner here. You can’t do much against that kind of money’. What about the cocks? Can you train them? ‘Nope’, came the short reply. ‘You can’t teach ’em anything except fight. That’s all the fuckers want to do. It’s in their blood’. So, there’s no way of teaching them how to launch, or evade, a cunning attack? ‘Nope. All you can do is teach ’em to jump up in the air at each other when they start fighting. The rest is luck’. Could he, or anyone, judge from the way a cock looks or behaves whether it’ll win a bout? ‘Nope’, Mike grinned again. ‘You may think you can – that’s why we all bet – but in fact we’ve no fuckin’ idea. Shii-it! If I knew that, I’d be more than rich!’ He took another sip of his beer, before suddenly gesticulating with one hand at a nearby kristo to see if he could lay a bet on the next fight. It didn’t seem to have worked because, the next thing I knew, Mike was telling me about betting. ‘You know what this means?’ He asked, showing me a hand sign with thumb and forefinger forming a circle and the remaining three fingers straight out. Now it was my turn to say ‘Nope!’ ‘That’s three to two. The odds. This’, he made a sign with all five fingers where one was quivering up and down, ‘is 9 to 8. 3 to 2 were

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the odds I was trying to get just now, but he wouldn’t give me better than 9 to 8, so I didn’t bet’. He thrust four fingers down in front of him, with the thumb tucked away out of sight. ‘Know what this means?’ ‘You’re betting 4,000?’ I said tentatively. ‘Right’. He looked pleased. This Irish guy had hope, in spite of his dumbfuck questions. ‘And this?’ He pointed five fingers up in the air. ‘50,000?’ ‘Good. And this?’ He held two fingers horizontally. ‘200 pesos?’ Mike nodded before drawing two fingers across his face in a kind of slashing cut-throat move. When I looked at him blankly, he grinned: ‘200,000 pesos. $4,000 US’. And yes, it seems people do occasionally bet that much. Mike jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards a couple of Americans sitting a few rows behind us. ‘That guy from Louisiana’s been betting hundred and fifty, sometimes two hundred, thousand on every fight since the first day. When I asked him how it was goin’ earlier, he didn’t say nuttin’, but just slashed his throat with one forefinger. Betting is what cockfights are all about’. Slowly, little by little, what had hitherto struck both Kambal and myself as incomprehensible hand signals began to make sense, as bookies and spectators exchanged odds and placed their bets. And, as the afternoon turned into evening, we could see how the flurry of bets around us increased both in numbers and in amounts. When we started our conversation, the rows around Mike, Kambal and myself had been totally empty. All the action had been taking place down in the cock ‘pit’ – a word Shakespeare used in Henry V to refer specifically to the area around and below the theatre stage, and which came to be used to refer to any place of frenzied activity. Now, though, we found ourselves surrounded by men (I spotted three women spectators in all during the whole afternoon and evening), as all the rows of seats were filled and the betting became more intense, more urgent. So let me summarise what I managed to put together during my afternoon and evening at the tournament, in follow-up emails with Mike, and from some revealing library searches. The Philippine cockfight, like the Balinese one so memorably described by Clifford Geertz, follows particular procedures, both before and during each fight. Every fight is preceded by a ninety second ‘showing-off’ of the competing birds. Each of these is cradled in the arms of its owner and lovingly stroked (as I’d seen Tuto, Boshio

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and Joy do), one each side of the ring, and is made to face off with another cock from the same farm – either by placing them beak to beak, to show by the entrant’s reaction whether or not it’s likely to fight well; or by allowing them to stand on the floor and simulate an attack on each other while its owner and his assistant hold the tails of the two sparring cocks to stop them from properly engaging in a fight. A little like the weigh-in before a boxing bout, this allows onlookers to judge which side they think is likely to win the fight, and so to place bets accordingly. It’s at this point, then, that spectators enter the life-and-death drama. First of all, the kasedor, a kind of ‘ring-master’, takes bets on which cock will be the winner, both from the owners of the cocks themselves and from his friends and supporters crowding the preferencia stepped seats right by one side of the ring. This centre bet is, therefore, a compound bet, known as the parada, and is made up of the bets placed by the owner of a cock, together with additional bets made by his friends and allies. Who sides with whom, therefore, against who else, is what interests the anthropologist, since the parada reveals social alliances, factions and power groups in Philippine society. This has been discussed at the local level by Scott Guggenheim, who wrote about regional cockfights in the northern part of Luzon, and showed how political obligations, kinship, neighbourhood and, to a

Figure 28.4. Two cocks facing off in the ring before a World Slasher Cup fight. © Brian Moeran.

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lesser extent, employment and ethnicity ties, all played a part in the regulation of betting at local cockfights. This was something I was unable to learn about very much during my one visit to the WSC, although once or twice Mike pointed to a cock owner (or ‘cocker’) in the ring and made a comment like: ‘that’s Juan Bautista – one of the most powerful men around. The Filipinos love him’; or ‘That guy’s the son – no, nephew, I think – of a really famous American breeder. The Trumper family have been breeding cocks forever’. The WSC website also gives an indication of power relations in its summary of the elimination and semi-final rounds of the competition. Which half dozen names are cited among three dozen or so suggests that the named are known and important in the Philippine sabong world: for example, ‘the 2017 Pitmaster champ Paolo Malvar with Ryan Esteban, veteran Raymond Valero/Lito Cay, defending champion Patrick Antonio, and WSC 2 champ Rey Briones’. A second characteristic of the centre bet parada is that the bets from each side should more or less match each other. For the most part, the difference in amounts between the two centre bets during the afternoon and evening didn’t amount to more than 100,000 pesos (US$2,000). One reason for this is that no breeder wants to be seen as the underdog and so does his best to match the higher sum placed by his opponent. This he usually cannot do on his own, and so, from time to time, the kasedor would cross to the far side of the ring to solicit contributions from spectators standing in the pit below. The final sums gathered then decide how each contestant is classified. The one accumulating most money in the centre bet is said to be ‘Meron’ (literally meaning ‘there is’, equivalent to ‘favourite’); the other ‘Walá’ (‘there is not’, equivalent to ‘the underdog’). The giant scoreboard placed high on one side of the arena colour codes the entrant with the greater stake (meron) in green and walá in red. These centre bets are not insignificant. Mike told me that in his very first fight some ten years ago, his opponent bet just over one million pesos (about $20,000), while he himself bet P165,000 (he has never bet more than P220,000 on his own bird). As a foreign newcomer, there was no way he was going to increase this sum since he had no supporters, and so the large difference was allowed to stand. To the chagrin of his opponent, Mike’s cock won (‘mashed the fucker’) and he pocketed a welcome P900,000 ($18,000), after the organiser had taken its 10 per cent cut. The minimum centre bet at the WSC finals is P50,000; there’s no maximum limit. Mike himself has witnessed a P2.2 million centre bet during the years he’s attended the competition. The most that I myself

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witnessed was P770,000 versus P630,000 for one contest; in general bets varied from P120,000 to P3-400,000 during the early rounds of the grand finals. The public tallying and announcement of the total of the two centre bets by the kasedor triggers a flurry of activity among onlookers in the open area around the cockpit and lower ‘patron’ seats. Suddenly, as I noted earlier, men start raising one arm into the air and flapping all fingers of their hand in an attempt to attract directly the attention of a would-be bettor, or of a bookie who then links a punter with somebody prepared to bet against him. In this way, two spectators in totally different parts of the venue can bet against each other. Some of these ‘bookies’ are dressed in yellow jackets with Taga-Pusta written on them to indicate that they are official kristo. Most others are private bookies out to make some money through commissions. Each kristo starts by calling out whether the bet is for ‘Meron’ or ‘Walá’, and indicates with his hands what odds he is offering. These may start at three to two, before narrowing down to – say – eleven to eight (as Mike explained earlier). Each would-be bettor, or punter, offers his own odds. Once there’s agreement between kristo and bettor, the latter indicates how much he wishes to bet. This negotiation is done entirely silently, even though kristo and bettor may be standing quite close to each other. The only sounds, other than the ‘Meron’ or ‘Walá’ calls from the kristo, involve a whistle, shout or clapping of hands, to attract the attention of a kristo offering odds the bettor is willing to agree to. Once the fight is over, the kristo (who remembers the faces of all those with whom he has interacted) either pays or receives a bet directly, or receives the money owed by one punter before passing it on to the winner, taking a 10 per cent commission as he does so. There’s a tendency, it seems, for Filipinos to bet more often on the ‘big money’ (meron) than on the lesser sum bet in the centre. To show his ‘American-ness’ perhaps, Mike consistently bet on the underdog (walá), and ended up, for the most part, losing. This frenzied interaction continues for well over a couple of minutes and only dies down when the two opposing cocks are placed on the ground in the ring. Once the fight is over, payments are made, and spectators return to their conversations, as well as the food and drink readily on tap and brought around by arena attendants. The occasional massage woman also wanders around offering her services – especially to three or four foreign men huddled together in the patrons’ seats. The role of the black-and-white stripe shirted referee, the sentensyador, is critical to the outcome of each fight, and thus to the

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results of all the bets laid. Whenever he sees both birds motionless in the ring (usually one on top of the other), he picks them up carefully by the backs – one in each hand – and places them beak to beak. If one or both birds still peck at each other, he drops them to the floor and allows them to fight on, until one or other is too weak to show any attacking spirit. The sentensyador again picks up one in each hand for the ‘sentence’ – raising them about three feet into the air, lowering them, then raising them again (but lower, to about a foot or foot and a half), lowering them, and finally raising them a third time just off the floor, before lowering the losing cock under the nose of its victorious opponent. The loser lies motionless, probably already dead, and certainly mortally wounded. The winner is tagged by an official and the winning owner walks off with his (almost invariably) wounded bird cradled in his arms. The result of the fight is announced over the loudspeaker, the ring is swept of loose feathers, and the next fight is ready to begin, but not before one thousand peso notes are rolled up in bundles and thrown across spectators’ seats as dozens of losing punters pay their debts. And so it goes on – from three o’clock in the afternoon until after midnight, as seventy-three fights are contested and the winner declared. The prize money consists of cockers’ entrance fees. There were 270 entrants in 2019, each paying P100,000 (US$2,000). Once the organisers had taken their 10 per cent commission from the entry fee, this gave a total potential prize money of P2,430,000 (US$48,600). The winner received just over half of the total (P1,336,500 or US$22,825), with the remaining 45 per cent divided up among the runners-up (determined by who had achieved at least six wins in the tournament). But Kambal and I don’t stay to the end. By 11 pm, we’d taken our leave of Mike (who by then must have downed a dozen cans of beer) and started the long drive back home. What are we to make of all this? In his analysis of the Balinese cockfight, Clifford Geertz showed how it was a ‘cultural performance’ highlighting cultural themes that otherwise lay buried, or half-buried, behind the façade of everyday life. He described in impressive detail both the structure of the cockfight and its participants, and the system of centre and outside betting. My impression from visiting the WSC is that there was little difference in what I witnessed at the Smart Araneta Coliseum from Geertz’s description – an impression that I’ve since had confirmed by Scott Guggenheim’s account of the Philippine cockfight, as he witnessed it several dozen times in northern Luzon back in the late 1980s.

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All the same, Guggenheim writes that, although ‘there is a remarkable similarity in cockfight structure between Indonesia and the Philippines, not everybody “gets the point” of the cockfight’. Some Filipino cockers agree with Geertz’s notion of ‘deep play’; others see only a cockfight; yet others, like my friend Kambal, have never been to a cockfight in their lives. When I asked him the following morning if being at the WFC had been interesting, he replied: ‘No. Not interesting. Very boring. Except the red ladies in mini skirts and high heels’. He beamed as he recalled the long-legged beauties brought on to dance during an intermission, and gave me another high five. This brings into question Geertz’s theory of cultural performance, since, as Guggenheim point out, he fails ‘to specify which social relations cockfighting is silent about, as well as which ones it “comments” on; who understands the messages conveyed through cockfighting; or even how accurate a portrait of social relations is painted in the cockfight’. After having witnessed some 150 cockfights in Piat in northern Luzon, and having analysed their betting structure, Guggenheim is able to show just who makes use of the parada to assert status and power through patronage, as well as through family, neighbourhood, employment, and occasionally ethnic, alliances. Cockfights thus come to reflect status classes in the Philippines. At the same time, The story that the Balinese tell themselves about themselves is remarkably similar to the story that Filipinos tell themselves about themselves. The Philippine cockfight parallels Balinese cockfighting in a number of ways: the identification of self with cock, the ‘status bloodbath’ that goes on in the pit, the requirement to follow lines of social affiliation in betting, and the omnipresence of hierarchy in virtually every aspect of the sport.

Guggenheim’s argument is that cockfighting does not bring the principles of Philippine social structure to light, but hides them. Cockfighting symbols and activities aren’t a given, but are always changing in historical, regional and political contexts. So, while the symbolic code is important, it’s subject to people’s everyday lives and interpretations of the ritual. My own extremely limited experience of a somewhat special kind of cockfight tournament doesn’t allow me to expand on these arguments. There were things that Mike said which made me realise that occasionally two status groups would be competing with each other through their central bets. But, as an outsider to both the cockfight world and Philippine society as a whole, I failed to recognise

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any of the names he mentioned and thus couldn’t begin to untangle the political implications of what went on at the WSC. So can I take Philippine cockfighting in another direction? When I think of all that I’ve witnessed here in Bibiclat over the past three months, one word that comes to mind is ‘sacrifice’. Extended family relations involve sacrifice, as individual members – like Blessica, for example – forsake their everyday lives to help another relative. This notion of sacrifice comes to the fore when I consider the stories told me by Filipinos and Filipinas who have spent many years working as OFWs abroad. JhonJhon’s and Malou’s accounts of the time they spent working in Saudi Arabia epitomise the sacrifices they made on behalf of their children. Filipinos’ fervent faith in Catholicism underpins the ultimate sacrifice made by Christ for the future of humanity (something borne out in the Black Nazarene ritual). Sacrifice is, perhaps, a two-edged concept in the sense that, like any other ‘keyword’ (democracy, individual, human rights, and so on), it can mean different things to different people. Its use is also potentially so broad as to make its theoretical application dubious. After all, it’s both a physical act (as in the cockfight or circumcision rituals) and part of a symbolic code (OFWs and the family). Still, I think it worth pursuing a little to see where the concept takes us in our search for an understanding of contemporary Philippine society. According to classical anthropological theory (Hubert and Mauss), every sacrifice is a religious act. By consecrating the victim, it in some way modifies the social or moral condition of the person who accomplishes it, or the objects used in sacrifice. In this sense, sacrifice ‘makes sacred’, and involves three elements: a person making the sacrifice (the ‘sacrificer’); an object or animal that is sacrificed; and a person or other entity (like a god) to whom the sacrifice is made (the ‘sacrifier’). As such, it forms a ritual connection between profane and sacred worlds. Take teenage boys’ circumcision, for example. Like other initiation rites, it is sacrificial in the sense that the ambulario acts as the ‘sacrificer’ who cuts off the offending foreskin; the boy the ‘sacrifier’ who ‘benefits’ from the ritual (he is, or was, believed to able to beget children as a result of being circumcised); and the foreskin becomes the object sacrificed. The only thing missing in this alliance is the deity receiving the sacrifice (was there, perhaps, a river deity worshipped by Filipinos way before their conversion to Christianity?). Maybe, though, we can regard the continuation of the family as that ‘deity’,

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given the importance given to kinship here in Bibiclat and elsewhere in the Philippines. So, too, with the cockfight. The sacrifiers are the cock owners who must be purified before each tournament, and so be rid of profane imperfections. Some say that, as part of their preparation rites, they should abstain from sexual relationships until after a fight. Various other beliefs supporting or militating against success abound. Guggenheim reports that the most effective charm ensuring a cocker’s success is ‘the underwear of a virgin stolen on Good Friday and smuggled into Mass the following Sunday, during which it “receives Communion”’. In the ring, the sacrifier places his bird in a prescribed position (a cock should not be able to gash itself as it is set down) and turned in the direction laid down by rites (facing its opponent). The sacrificer this time is the sentensyador, who decides which rooster has won or lost a fight. He is, in Hubert and Mauss’ words, ‘the visible agent of consecration in the sacrifice’. He’s the only one allowed to touch a bird once its owner has released it in the ring; the one who, like a priest, lays on his hands and passes sentence; the one who returns the victim to its owner after the sacrificial fight has taken place – at the same time passing on to him new qualities (in the form of status and financial reward) the owner has acquired by the action of sacrifice. The victims are, of course, the cocks themselves. These, too, like their owners, need to be properly prepared for the sacrifice by being submitted to a whole gamut of ceremonies. They are kept in special farms, put through special routines, fed special diets, including medications of one sort or another. Finally, a specially trained knifetier, or ‘heeler’, carefully attaches the knives (tari) to a cock just before a fight. As in sacrifices all over the world, death should be prompt. The tari themselves form part of the tools used in the sacrifice, which takes place in a special place and usually at a particular time (often a Sunday in the countryside). The cockpit is a sanctified enclosure with greater (the ring) and lesser (surrounding food stalls) degrees of purified space marked out, and the pit itself is enclosed, its floor space painted with inner and outer circles, at the very centre of which the sentensyador pronounces the winner of a fight. The whole activity of the cockfight – and of the central and individual betting among participants – is thus organised and concentrated around a single focal point. Everything converges on the victim at the centre of a magic circle marking out the sacred space of the sacrifice, into which only the sacrificer and his victim can step.

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Working overseas is also a kind of sacrifice. In this case, though, the sacrifier is an ideology of family, which makes one of its members the victim. The sacrifice, then, is the victim’s actual family, to which he or she returns, reborn, from the otherwise untouchable sacred space of a foreign country. Sacrifice is often seen to be a ‘gift’, of the kind made by Jhon-Jhon and Malou to their children’s welfare, and other OFWs to their families to whom they send home money every month. It is also regarded as a form of communion, as when Filipinas working as domestic helpers in different parts of Hong Kong will bond in their shared isolation, form friendship groups (based on local Hong Kong rather than Philippine island residence), and share child-rearing duties as they cook for one another and take it in turns to catch up on lost sleep. Sacrifice is also an act of communion when a whole barkada, or group, of boys is circumcised together at the same time. Circumcision thus becomes a public declaration and a political statement of gender alignment, as patrilineal authority is made to appear natural and inevitable. It is what men must suffer if they are to maintain power over women. But sacrifice may also involve causality, of the kind we’ve seen when Blessica, Tuto and others talk about circumcision and the ability to beget offspring, or bring about accompanying hygiene and cleanliness. Working overseas brings in enough money to enable completion of a house – or, at least, the start of a new building or renovation of the old family home. Success in cockfighting leads to enhanced social status and power. Circumcision, the cockfight and working overseas suggest that sacrifice takes place within, and reinforces, a symbolic system – embracing family, gender relations and patron-client ties. Circumcision sets apart men from women, and boys from teenagers able to beget children. Mothers and fathers leave their children in the care of relatives (grandmother, sister, aunt) for often more than a decade when they go abroad to work, seeing their families, if they’re fortunate, for just two weeks every year when they come home for their annual holidays. The very brevity of their visits brings about a massive family reunion as siblings and their families crowd around the relative who has sacrificed herself for her extended family. This reunion acts as a kind of catharsis for all concerned. In the same way, while reinforcing status relations within Philippine society, the cockfight itself, and the death of one or both birds, act as catharsis. If sacrifice is a gift, it may also involve the ‘obligation of a return’ famously described by Marcel Mauss. Filipinos who have emigrated

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for good abroad (mostly to the United States) still keep their Filipino ‘hearts’ by returning ‘home’ every year to participate in the World Slasher Cup. The sacrifices made by family members, young boys and cockers create a distinction between giving and exchanging, since they transform gifts into reciprocity. By sacrificing themselves for their children, parents ensure that they will themselves be looked after in later life. By allowing themselves to be circumcised, young boys ensure that their family line will continue, that they themselves will be looked after by their children when they grow old, and that their future relations with women will remain patriarchal. Sacrifice is both perfect selflessness – the surrender which anticipates no return – and a form of violence based on expected return, where a loss must be compensated for by some form of gain (foreskin for sexual activity; cockerel for enhanced status; working abroad for the financial wherewithal to send one’s children to college). Sometimes sacrifice is based on entitlement (circumcision, the cockfight and patriarchy); at other times on a kind of masquerade that ignores the violence of the act and pretends that it doesn’t exist (betting on the cockfight; laughing in recollection at one’s circumcision; basking in the adulation of relatives during annual brief trips home from work abroad). In addition, there’s always the uncertainty surrounding any sacrifice. Will it in fact work? Will an OFW be able to finance her dream house, or will she be imprisoned for allegedly stealing her employer’s jewellery? Will spitting on a cock’s feathers make it strong enough to win its fights? Does circumcision really have any effect on one’s ability to beget children? Whichever of these terms (gift or exchange) best describes a sacrificial act, sacrifice itself involves transformation – the destruction of something valuable in order to gain something of more value (a foreskin for sexual maturity; a cock for prestige; hardship among OFWs for material gain). Sacrifice, then, is a kind of what the Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, back in 1942 in reference to capitalism, called ‘the perpetual gale of creative destruction’. It is also, as the stories of circumcision in Bibiclat suggest, an issue of ‘moral control’. In so doing, it estranges: circumcision is ‘good’ for boys who become ‘men’ in the process; cocks are killed so that their owners may gain prestige in Philippine society; OFWs endure hardships abroad for long periods of time ‘for the good of the family’, and ultimately, ‘for the good of the nation’ – as recognised by President Duterte when he passed various decrees to help OFWs upon their return home. The enigma surrounding the issue of why people make sacrifices is, as Georges Bataille wrote, ‘the ultimate question’. Why do Filipina

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domestic workers in Hong Kong continue to work in appalling conditions for what are, outside the Philippines themselves, pittance wages, regularly putting in seventy-two- to eighty-hour weeks for what works out as less than US$2 an hour? Why does one generation after another of young boys offer itself to a barbaric and painful ritual? Why do Philippine men continue to slaughter cocks in a brutal manner, when cockfighting is forbidden in most other countries in the world because of its perceived ‘inhumanity’? In every case, the isolation afforded by the sacrifice leads back to community – witness OFWs’ explosive usage of social media with which to communicate with their loved ones back home, as well as with other fellow ‘inmates’ in the particular ‘societal prison’ in which they are confined (expat or local families in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Hong Kong and elsewhere). Individual anguish is shared and laughter once again surfaces among a people who’ve been downtrodden both by the elements (typhoons, tsunami, earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions) and by their fellow countrymen (and it is mostly men who become the country’s dictators and ‘strong rulers’). Blessica cannot not laugh for longer than thirty seconds. Sometimes, as I’ve said, she and Nana are convulsed with laughter, in the way that children often are at school when they know they should be serious. And yet Blessica has had an incredibly difficult life. When her husband Franklin fell ill over a long period of time, she not only found herself having to give up her precious job to nurse him, but, as I said earlier, was also obliged to sell all her jewellery and valuables to help pay for his medical expenses. She expresses now this sacrificial pain through the only way possible: laughter. This is the enigma of the Filipino people whose shared laughter becomes a form of sacred – as well as cultural – communication. The joy of laughter is the joy of having conquered sacrificial death: in Bataille’s words, ‘the joy of living… a kind of dawn, a strange promise of glory’. Shared laughter, then, is communion – which makes the Catholic rite of the same name little more than a mockery. Laughter releases one from solitude. It breaks down barriers – the barriers of status difference, gender and patron-client relations. Laughter says: ‘To hell with everything! You cannot keep me down!’ It rebels against the status quo, provides an alternative means of control. Laughter enables the circumcised boy, the Filipina domestic worker, the long-suffering wife, to overcome the anguish of their individual lives and, in some measure, to become God. Laughter, like sacrifice itself, communicates anguish, and is, as Bataille says, the sum of that anguish.

29

Religious Side Bets Today is Monday. In theory, this is the one day in the week when the local Catholic church does not entertain us with its choral dirges at around 5 am, but not this morning when it was blared out through the church tower loudspeakers even earlier than usual. Nana, who hadn’t been able to sleep, was downstairs and told me that soon after there was the sound of a small band of drums and wind instruments thumping their way up the street, followed by a statue of the Virgin Mary and a few devout believers, who were following it all the way around Bibiclat. Apparently, it is the ‘Novena’. Exactly what the Novena consists of here is, at the moment, unclear. ‘Nine’, of course, is a magic number, but whether this rite is going to carry on for nine days or nine weeks, I’m not sure. Nana says nine days, so we can look forward to more lost sleep over the next week and a half. During a Novena, which is said to be popular in the Philippines – one is dedicated to the Black Nazarene festival on 9 January in Manila, as well as to a Black Madonna statue in Loboc, Bohol – devotees say special prayers together and implore the Virgin Mary to intercede on their behalf in support of their petitions to the Almighty for this, that and the other. It is, in the phrase of one anthropologist specialising in the study of Christianity, ‘a supplicatory act of worship’. Originally practised when somebody – a loved one – died, the Novena consisted of nine days of mourning, followed by a feast. That’s how long it takes for the soul to properly detach itself from the body, and in the past the bereaved were not allowed to bathe during this period. Over time, the Novena was adopted by Roman Catholics who

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now associate it with the nine months Jesus – like most of us – spent in the womb; the ninth hour when he finally died on the cross; and the nine days spent by the Virgin Mary and Jesus’ Apostles waiting for the Holy Spirit to descend (Pentecost). Apparently, the Church Fathers later assigned special meaning to the number nine because it precedes what they believed to be the perfect number of ten. Nine then becomes symbolic of imperfect man turning to God in prayer. The Novena here, though, is not about mourning of the already dead, but an anticipation of one to take place – at least, symbolically (as the Novena used during the Black Nazarene indicates in the way it marks the journey taken by Christ as he carried his cross to Calgary and his crucifixion). Easter this year falls on 21 April, which means that Holy Week starts on Monday 15 April. Today being 11 February, there are exactly nine weeks until the start of Holy Week. Neither Nana nor Blessica knows too much about the Novena, other than that it ‘happens from time to time’. So, as I write, none of us knows if we are going to have nine nights, or nine consecutive Mondays, of interrupted sleep. Blessica excuses her ignorance by saying that she isn’t a Catholic – something I’d vaguely registered before – but a born-again Christian. This she regards as less rigid and much freer than Catholicism, which follows prescribed ritual, with the exception of the weekly homily. As Nana puts it: ‘In the Catholic Church, you know everything in advance. So you start kneeling, for example, before the priest tells you to. Everything is fixed’. Blessica illustrates the advantages of being born-again by waving her arms in the air, half dancing in her chair at the breakfast table, and singing. ‘No statues!’ She laughs. ‘Nothing inside. We just sing. We Christians happy’. An interesting way of putting things. When talking, Blessica often makes this distinction between Catholics and Christians. It’s not that Catholics aren’t Christians, of course; they’re just a different kind of Christian, and being born again is the only real kind of Christian. Nana, who, like her parents, two brothers and their wives, is a Catholic, puts matters somewhat differently, in a manner that echoes the Philippine cockfight: ‘Born-again Christians, Adventists, Iglesia (ni Cristo), and so on are all side bets! We Catholics know better’. She then adds: ‘I’ll tell you something interesting. Born Again have to give ten per cent of their salary to their church. For Catholics, it’s up to them whether to give, or not to give’. She gives a short, sharp nod of her head, as if to say that that settles matters. As the youngest of eight, she’s a tough nut to crack, as all her

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siblings well know from almost five decades of experience, and as I’m beginning to find out. ‘Not only that, but when a Born Again is in trouble, their Church doesn’t give anything back’. I ask Blessica if that’s true. Didn’t her church help her when Franklin was ill? She shrugs as she cooks mid-morning merienda for the workers, and tries to explain things away. ‘Sometimes I give to the church; sometimes not. When my husband ill, we get nothing. But we not go to church regularly then, so…’. Her voice tails off with another forgiving shrug. But why, when brought up as a Catholic, transfer allegiance to a different church? ‘Because Franklin was a born-again Christian’, Blessica says simply. Which leads to more interesting information. Veronica, the oldest of the sisters, is Catholic. Viola, however, is a born-again Christian, as is her husband, Gusto. The third sister, Salomé, is a Seventh Day Adventist. Teté is Catholic, although her daughter, Yoyo, converted to Iglesia ni Cristo when she married Nicholas, because his family are all members of that Church. Sherwin, for different reasons, perhaps connected with his girlfriend, also converted to the same church a couple of years ago (much to his mother’s disappointment), just before his father’s murder. So, what once was a Catholic family of two parents and eight children, has now divided into four separate churches. Although Viola and Blessica first encountered born again Christianity while they were working in Manila, it was their marriages that sealed their formal conversion. Franklin was already a born again Christian when Blessica met and later married him. Gusto, on the other hand, transferred his allegiance to Viola’s youthful inclinations. Salomé became a Seventh Day Adventist when she married her husband, as did one of Teté’s daughters, Ronaline. Yoyo, as I mentioned earlier, joined Iglesia ni Cristo on marrying Nicholas. Although no hard and fast rule prevails about which partner joins the other partner’s religious affiliation, there seems to be a tendency for couples to share the same church’s beliefs. But it’s only a tendency. One of our painters, Joy, has three brothers. All four boys, like their father, are Roman Catholics. He also has three sisters, each one of whom follows Iglesia ni Cristo, because that’s the church their mother belongs to! Nana and I were married, not in a Catholic, but in an Aglipayan church, which had no side walls and sported a figurine of the Virgin Mary decorated with a strand of barbed wire reminiscent of some relic

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from Auschwitz, in a ceremony that I suspected (wrongly) at the time might not have been entirely legal. We aren’t Aglipayans, however. If, like me, you’ve never heard of the Aglipayan church, let me add that it was founded by a former Catholic priest, Gregorio Aglipay Cruz y Labayan. To his credit, perhaps, Aglipay was excommunicated by the Pope back in 1899 for being a political activist who incited patriotic rebellion among the Philippine clergy (it was the period when Filipinos were rebelling against Spanish colonialism and the resulting American invasion of their country). He was around that time appointed Military Vicar General of the revolutionaries by their leader and, following his excommunication for ‘usurpation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction’, he was appointed Supreme Bishop of the newly established ‘Philippine Independent Church’ (or ‘Spiritual Head of the Nation Under Arms’) in 1903. During his term of office, he continued to side with nationalist and radical political factions (including, later, Socialist and Communist Parties), and at one point in the early twentieth century his church boasted more than one quarter of the population of the Philippines. Like Aglipay himself, his followers refused to believe in the Trinity and opted for a Unitarian theology. For a while, at least. Later, though, Aglipay’s own church refused to adopt its founder’s progressive theological amendments, which are most evident in his own Novena, the Novena of the Motherland. To be honest, the idea of getting married in church has never appealed to me. I did so in Hong Kong, where my pregnant Danish partner, Lise, and I were joined in matrimony in the Seamen’s Mission. I justified this by telling my new father-in-law, who was the strictest of Lutherans, that we’d got married there because Lise was pregnant and so my semen had done its mission. I’m not sure he really understood the joke (neither his English nor his sense of humour was that refined), but he laughed politely anyway. As for getting married in what I thought at the time was a, or the, Catholic church, the notion sort of appalled my Church of England or Ireland sentiments, but Father Arturo was the only person in the region, it seemed, who could or would perform a marriage service without obliging us to wait for two to three weeks for the banns to be posted (as is otherwise customary in the Philippines). Not only this, but his licence to marry us was due to expire three days after we first met him, and the day after that Nana and I had to return to work in Hong Kong. So we had a different kind of ‘shotgun’ wedding (the last Father Arturo performed): much to the delight of four sisters, a brother, two sisters-in-law, a nephew and one Bibiclat school friend,

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Lyn (of Alfonso fame), most of whom, as photographs show, came to somewhere between my nipples and my belly button in height. And which comes first, church or family? ‘Family, of course’, says Nana with a derisive snort – perhaps because, unlike religious beliefs, you cannot choose your relatives?

30

The Foreigner at Large Whenever a family member drops by to see Nana, he or she automatically comes to me, takes my hand, and raises it to their forehead. Very small children are told what to do by their mothers who say, depending on their knowledge of English, ‘Bless by Un-kel!’ This is a wordless greeting, rather like the ones I give by jerking my head and raising my eyebrows quickly up and down at children when walking the street in Bibiclat, or at farmers riding by on their way to and from their fields. In the early weeks, most people stared; some smiled; a few said ‘hello’. As is to be expected, the children tended to be the most forthcoming – ‘Wossurneím?’ and ‘howarrrú?’ (the three words are slurred into one, with rising final intonation) being their most common greetings, accompanied by plenty of laughter at their actually using a phrase they’d learned in school. Still, most of them tended to run away the moment I replied. One group, though, has started to call me by my nickname. ‘Boo!’ they call, skidding to a halt beside me on their bikes (often with young brother perched on the cross bar). They then give me a high five and ride away, laughing happily. Over time, local people have come to know of my existence. At first, it was just one or two who occasionally stopped to ask who I was and where I was going. Now, most people in each of the streets I walk along call out a greeting of some sort. One man selling barbecued pork on the corner of the road out to the fields, said ‘Hey, Professor!’ Several teenage girls have zoomed by on their motorbikes, calling out ‘Bri-yan! Howarrrú?’

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Word certainly gets around. Where the ‘professor’ information came from I’ve no idea, but I suspect that Dar’s daughter, Queenie, has spread the word about my name at the local school. Several weeks later, when the three of us – together with four more friends – were walking past the local barangay sports centre, a couple of dozen teenage girls saw us and began shouting out, ‘Bri-yan! Bri-yan!’ When I asked her if she was responsible for their knowing my name, Queenie gave one of her delightful smiles and nodded demurely: ‘Yes, Un-kél’. I usually keep my answers to questions simple; the people I’m talking to probably know everything about me anyway without having to ask – like when one of Queenie’s friends, Maika, asked me how old I was, while a group of us was out for a walk, and I told her to guess. ‘Seventy-five!’ they chorused in unison and broke up with laughter. Maika had merely been practising her English, and she and her friends were all delighted to find out that it worked. As for where I’m going, I’ve learned to say things like ‘over there’ and point vaguely in one direction or another. Another vague phrase which seems to satisfy people’s curiosity is ‘the fields’ (tumana), although Trixie, a ten-year-old girl whom I’ve got to know, did ask ‘why?’ and all I could answer was ‘Because it’s nice out there’. She wasn’t that impressed, but gave me an encouraging high five anyway. Anyway, I’m left to my own devices as I stride out along the concrete road running as straight as a dye into the fields, where I’m assailed by cries of ‘Hey friend!’, ‘Hey Joe!’, ‘Hey man! Wossup?’, ‘Kano!’ (Amerikano, since all foreigners are assumed to be American), accompanied by two hoots of the horn from farmers returning home, and even the occasional ‘Good evening, sir’ from a passing cyclist. One cool teenage boy even addressed me as ‘Hey, bro!’ On my own way back, if asked where I’m going, I simply answer ‘Home’. Sometimes, as I’ve learned from Nana, pursed lips and an upwardly jerking pout in the direction you’re going is all that’s necessary. No further questions are asked. Which leads me to surmise that asking somebody where they’re going is like a greeting. So long as you say something, nobody really cares about the answer (think of our impatience when somebody starts going into endless detail about their various infirmities when asked a simple ‘How are you?’). It was rather different when I lived in the countryside in Japan. There, people would ask where you were going and the usual response would be along the lines of ‘I’m just off to town’ (chotto, machi

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ni kudatteru), or ‘I’m just (out for) a walk’ (chotto, sampo), although the idea of a leisurely walk was extremely alien to them. Walking should have a purpose – to go and work in the fields, or cut down trees in the cedar plantations. As often as not, responses were limited to the even simpler ‘I’m just…’ (chotto), which stated clearly that the speaker didn’t wish to let on about anything he or she was up to. And that was about as far as interchanges went, although they were always accompanied by a smile to stop you from feeling slighted. But in the Japanese countryside, people were extremely aware of what everyone else was up to. They felt that they needed to know what their neighbours, friends, relatives and colleagues were doing, because this was information that could, indeed should, be used or passed on if, as and when appropriate. So people carefully rationed any personal information they gave out, since they didn’t necessarily want to be talked about by others. I don’t get that feeling here (and Nana confirms my intuition). Still, when I set out on my late afternoon walks, I feel a bit like a member of royalty or some kind of celebrity, living here in the middle of nowhere. I guess some of it, at least, has to do with my height. This is particularly so of children. I unintentionally scared the living daylights out of some kids one evening when, in Tagalog, I said that I wasn’t American, but Irish. JR, who had taught me what to say, said that I sounded very fierce and that was why the children ran away, clearly in fright! On another occasion, a small boy came out from his house to take my hand to be blessed, followed by his very small sister, probably little more than three or four years old. As she came forward uncertainly to take my hand, she suddenly changed her mind and backed away to hide behind her mother’s skirt. Her father, who was watching from the other side of the road with a couple of friends, started laughing. ‘Giant!’ He said. ‘Afraid of giant!’ ‘Kapré!’ I exclaimed, to show that at least I knew one Tagalog word. The three of them laughed happily. ‘Afraid of kapré!’ Given that Nana is only four foot eleven inches tall, I guess we could almost be the giant and the dwarf said by the espiritista to be living in the ylang-ylang tree behind her parents’ house. The trouble with this imaginative leap is that, although I’m tall, I’m not a ‘big, black, terrifying, muscular creature’ (as Wikipedia describes the kapré). This tree demon, though, is also said to emit a strong smell, thus mirroring a near universal belief that ‘the good’ smell good, and ‘the bad’ smell bad. In other words, besides indicating physiology,

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morality, seduction, gender and social bonding, how we express our sense of smell points to otherness. Foreigners, in particular, are singled out by their smell. Just as Europeans and Americans have been known to use body odour as a means to describe and classify symbolically other races (think, among other things, of our own prejudice against certain peoples whom we regard as using too much garlic in their cooking), many Asian peoples adopt a similar classificatory principle when talking about Caucasians. When Japanese first encountered Europeans and Americans, for example, they used to describe them as ‘smelling of butter’ (batā kusai). Nana, whose experience of foreigners has been limited, says that Indians – like Philippine spirits – smell of onions, but that her Chinese employers were extremely clean and didn’t smell. The old lady for whom she first worked insisted that Nana wash her hands before preparing food and that she even wash the skin of a banana before peeling it to eat. With her French employers, Nana made sure that the house smelt clean. Even though they’d occasionally tell her it wasn’t necessary to wash their clothes so frequently, she’d always do so if they smelled. As among Filipinos, it was the man, she felt, whose body odour was stronger than the woman’s. I’ve noticed that Nana uses her nose a lot to determine if clothes are clean, food fresh, or her husband has washed himself properly when having a shower. She also likes me to wear a white T shirt every day because, she says, it makes me look fresh and clean (and, she adds, younger). So cleanliness is linked to colour (and, possibly, age). If school uniforms are anything to go by, white is the colour of vitality and youth (as well as of purity, formality and death). Filipinos don’t classify Caucasians as smelling of this or that, but they are very conscious that a European – especially a man such as myself – can give off an odour that they find offensive. Cleanliness is a must, as Malou indicated when she told me how smelly Saudi Arabians were and how clean Filipinos were by comparison. Remember how one important reason for boys’ circumcision is to ensure cleanliness of their private parts (effected by guava leaves). Remember, too, how cleanliness must be performed at the right time. You don’t clean your house at night. To do so is to sweep away all your wealth, so cleaning can only take place during daylight hours. Similarly, cleaning the house isn’t done during the nine days in which a corpse ‘lies in state’ before burial. So, too, with the ritual cleansing that takes place once a year on St John the Baptist’s name day. The people of Bibiclat first defile themselves with mud, before cleansing themselves through prayer and water to wash away the dirt, thereby

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allowing the Catholic Church to make dirt clean and put matter back into place. Cleanliness upholds social order; smell endangers it. Which brings us back to the stinking kapré giant who lives in the occasional tree. In the end, there isn’t that much difference between a foreigner and a kapré. Their otherness is distinguished not just by their size, but by their smell and the fact that potentially, by being dirty, they are matter out of place.

31

She Love You, She Crazy On my walk this evening I encounter four teenage girls sitting under a tree by the entrance to the church. ‘Hey Joe!’ one calls out. ‘Hey! How are you?’ I respond. As usual, they start laughing together and high-fiving because their English has worked and the ‘foreigner’ has said something in return. Usually such encounters end in fits of giggles as the kids rush back into the safety of their compounds – often, I suspect, because they haven’t understood my simple reply. But this time my respondent continues, pointing to one of her friends, half hidden behind the church wall. ‘She love you’. ‘What?’ ‘She love you’. ‘She crazy’, I reply and the girls fall about with laughter, repeating my comment one after the other, while I walk on. I can still hear them in hysterics as I turn the corner a hundred yards further on, and head out to the fields. A few days later, at the entrance to the primary school opposite the church, two men watch me as I take a photo of the bougainvillea which has totally invaded an otherwise rather dour narra rosewood tree. ‘Where you from?’ one asks. ‘Ireland’, I reply. ‘Ah! Ireland! How long you stay in the Philippines?’ ‘Two months’.

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‘Ah! Two months’. The other man mutters something in Tagalog. My interlocutor turns back to me. ‘He say he have daughter. You want?’ I explain I’m already married, thank you. ‘Who you marry to?’ ‘Clara. Clara Aquinez’. ‘Ah! Clara’. More Tagalog with his friend who does his best to hide what comes across as disappointment. ‘Ah! Goodbye, sir’. Clearly, a Caucasian man, however old he may be, is seen as the path to financial redemption, even if it involves the sacrifice of a young daughter on the altar of marriage.

32

Valentine’s Day It’s Valentine’s Day. Or should that be Saint Valentine’s Day? The moment I come downstairs in the morning, Blessica calls out ‘Happy Valentine Day. Where are my chocolates?’ Black mark against me? Recalling that the domestic helpers in Hong Kong used to get quite excited over 14 February every year, I’d bought Nana a heart-shaped box of Rocher chocolates at the supermarket in Cabanatuan the other day, but – romantic old geezer that I am – had given it to her there and then for consumption today (mainly because I didn’t trust my memory to give it to her on Valentine’s Day itself). I didn’t buy anything, though, for Blessica. After all, she’s not my loved one! That, though, appears to be irrelevant in the Philippines. Although domestic helpers in Hong Kong would give one another small gifts of chocolates (usually just one chocolate – all they could afford), Valentine’s Day gift giving is first and foremost from men to women. It is, then, not an exchange as such, but an offering in the hope of receiving love. That love, when given, is unconditional. Women do the shopping, cook meals, clean the home, wash clothes, and so on – all those jobs that are anathema to women bent on gender equality – and, in return, expect their men to work hard and bring home money for the family. This the woman knows how best to spend as, when and where necessary. Married men and women may exchange gifts as a token of their love once they start living together. The complementarity of gift exchange thus matches that of husbandwife relations. Valentine’s Day is very much a culmination of the season of romance. Now’s the time when young people out of high school

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declare their love, and the day itself is very much for boyfriend and girlfriend, and man and wife (with husbands, I’m told, often going to love hotels with their mistresses on the day before or after the magic day). Tuto’s son, Marlon, turned up a couple of nights ago with his first girlfriend ever. We were in the midst of a slightly wild drinking session with Tuto, Joy and two of the other painters, so the nervous young couple were quickly ribbed. ‘You can’t go out together’, Nana mock-scolded them, after ascertaining the young girl’s name, ‘You’re cousins!’ The absolute no-no of boy-girl relations. In fact, it transpired this wasn’t true, although Tuto himself, who was in his cups, had to ensure that they weren’t related – or, at least, not enough to matter. I asked him if he approved. ‘He happy. I happy’, he said rather sweetly, and that was that. I thought it might be nice to give Marlon some money to take his girlfriend, Jonaline, out. After all, he hardly earns anything as an army recruit. But I wasn’t sure if this was appropriate and asked Nana for advice. She said that yes, I could give him some money to take Jonaline out for the evening, but then – to my surprise – added: why not give him the box of chocolates I’d already given her? After all, I was going to buy her an air conditioner soon. That could be her Valentine present, instead of the Rocher chocolates in their heart-shaped box. Hmmm. So it was agreed, even though I pointed out that Nana could hardly eat an air conditioner. She laughed that she was overweight anyway and could do without chocolates this year. When Marlon arrived here early this morning, therefore, I was ready for him and handed over the expensive box of chocolates. He blushed with happiness, as Nana asked him what he planned to do that evening. Answer? Take Jonaline to a park in Talavera and eat congee – a choice of neither place nor type of food that, as a seasoned lover, I would have recommended to a budding Casanova. Both Nana and I were doubtful that there is, in fact, a ‘park’ in the town. Marlon was probably referring to some open space behind a car park where he and his girlfriend could kiss each other undisturbed! Still, we added a few hundred pesos to the chocolates so that he could go to Jollibee, Chow King, McDonald’s, or some other equally popular fast food outlet, if he thought it appropriate. An Internet search has proved fruitless, but I suspect the custom of giving presents on Valentine’s Day here in the Philippines originated with American colonial rule. Blessica is pretty sure that her father and mother, Agapito and Arsenia, celebrated it before the Japanese

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invasion in December 1940. But this may be wishful thinking. She wasn’t alive then. That being said, Valentine’s Day here has surely – as elsewhere in the world – become inflated by marketing promotional strategies. Nana told me that when she was at high school, she had three boyfriends – one after the other – and that she might be taken out by one of them on the magical day. Nobody had any money in those days, so people didn’t give each other presents very much. They just hung out at one of the sari-sari stores or kiosks and drank soda together. ‘One of my boyfriends later became a florist’, Nana added, ‘and so did good business on Valentine’s Day. But that was after we went out together. I didn’t get any flowers then. Now he’s in prison’, she added shortly, as if this was just punishment meted out to him for not giving her flowers. Seeing my raised eyebrows, she clarified matters: ‘Drugs’. ‘Also, everything was secret in those days. A girl would have to go off alone somewhere first, to avoid suspicion, and then be picked up by her boyfriend on his motorbike and be taken to Cabanatuan, or wherever. If Agapito had seen me, he’d have … bang!’ She raised one hand with forefinger and thumb extended to imitate an imaginary pistol and pointed it at me. After which biographical snippets over breakfast, Nana relapsed into cellphone mode, scrolling through WhatsApp, where all her friends from Hong Kong were wishing one another ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’. One of them had posted a photo of a lollipop on a red background; another one of a bunch of tulips. Blessica, too, was glued to the screen of her mobile phone, but this time to Facebook where she’d posted a photo of the very box of chocolates that I had bought for Nana and passed on to Marlon. As a result, she was getting a few comments from ‘friends’, as well as from her older sister, Viola, asking who had given her such a nice present! Was it, perhaps, her (not so) ‘secret admirer’ who is living and working in Saudi Arabia at the moment? All he did, though, was post a flattering photo of Blessica wearing dark glasses in the snow – except, I realised once I put on my own glasses, the ‘snow’ was in fact tiny blue hearts fluttering down over the image of her face. By lunchtime, she had had more than 150 Valentine messages, of which only 35 were from men. By mid-afternoon, when they came to a stop, she’d received 212 messages, one of which read (in Tagalog): ‘The hotels were all booked, so we ended up in the woods!’ Joking aside, all this is a lot more than anyone ever sent me or any of my friends when I was a spotty teenager, and every unsigned card, counted on the fingers of one hand, inspired the possibility of a kiss

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when boarding school finally unlocked its prison gates and and we were allowed to go home. But that’s what every festival seems to be about – a gradual expansion of ritual objects, rites and places where they’re performed, as ritual gives way to mass consumption. Expressions of love, written by one individual to another, started to be sent on pre-printed cards in the late eighteenth century. Valentine’s Day spread from England to the USA in the 1840s, and brought with it a torrent of pre-printed poem cards (leading eventually to today’s ‘Hallmark Day’). Anonymity and recipients’ responses gradually died away, to be replaced by public declarations of love and ‘likes’. Expensive gifts and extravagant banquets and parties gave way to bouquets of roses and mass-produced greeting cards (now a £15 billion industry). In neighbouring Indonesia, which is predominantly Muslim, not Catholic, Valentine’s Day is referred to as the ‘Day for Caring’ (Hari Kasih Sayang). Here it’s called ‘the Day of the Hearts’ (Araw ng mga Puso) by the locals. One middle-aged, male foreigner whom we met in a shopping mall in Cabanatuan wished us a ‘Happy Heart Day!’ Why the hearts? Three theories are prevalent on the Internet: one, the more risqué, is that the stylised heart is based on the shape of a woman’s bottom, bent over; another, that what appears to be a heart is in fact an ivy leaf or an extinct seedpod, shaped just like the current heart symbol and used as part of the symbolism of ancient Greece and Rome; yet another, put forward by those in the field of medicine, suggests that the human heart, once stripped of its aorta and veins, looks remarkably like the image that we all know and use. Take your pick. In his book on American holidays, Bruce David Forbes argues that the heart came into use in the Middle Ages through two sources. One mode of popularisation was through the suit of hearts depicted on playing cards; the other was veneration of the Sacred Heart. Both sources of heart imagery arose around the same time as Valentine’s Day and became its central symbol (and now much used emoji). Although nobody seems to know where use of the heart came from in the Philippines, I suspect that its adoption owes more to the Sacred Heart used in Catholic imagery, than to playing cards, an ivy leaf, or a woman’s bottom. 14 February isn’t an official holiday or anything, but the mall was awash with red – shirts, dresses, heart-shaped balloons, cupids with arrows – and gaggles of school girls taking selfies of themselves all in red. One couple we met matched each other nicely – he in red shirt under a smart black blazer; she in a lacy red dress over a black slip.

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Later, I spotted a young man carrying a carefully wrapped bunch of flowers as he walked in the dust along a busy roadside. A bouquet of roses, apparently, costs between 1,000 and 1,200 pesos (£20) (three to four days’ work); a single stem 100 pesos. So Valentine’s Day feels very much like a holiday – as it does in other parts of Asia where a gift economy thrives. Hotels and restaurants are jam-packed with customers and often fully booked in advance. The prices of chocolates and flowers skyrocket. Traffic is even worse than usual. As a holiday, though, it isn’t seasonal, in the way it is in cold north European and American climes where mid-February heralds the beginning of spring. In fact, it’s the opposite here. February in the Philippines is the winter month – the month when temperatures drop to the mid-20s and people go about their work in relative comfort. Valentine’s Day’s seasonality here, therefore, is of a different kind to that experienced in Europe and the United States (and Japan, which is cold enough in previous months to have people thinking of the coming spring and, with it, the cherry blossoms). But the festival also has its national and religious overlay. Hindu and Islam societies like India, Malaysia and Indonesia object to it as a ‘Western’ and ‘Christian’ practice, while it’s banned outright in Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the Philippines, though, Valentine’s Day, with its focus on romantic love, underpins the basic social unit of the family and its intimate place in Catholicism. If violence and sacrifice, of the kind I’ve talked about in my descriptions of circumcision and the cockfight, are two important cultural traits (or tropes) that make up Philippine society, romance – surely – is another. Tonight, for example, virtually every school in the country holds a ‘Prom’ for its third and fourth year students, aged fifteen and sixteen – another ‘rite of passage’ for youngsters ready for romantic love and passing into adulthood. Many of them hire tuxedos and ball gowns for the occasion, in the hope that their class teachers will judge them to be the ‘Star’ of the Prom, entitling them to wear a sash during the evening. When they enter the especially hired venue, they dip into a box to draw out half a heart. Just two of them match each other perfectly, and their owners are then proclaimed ‘King and Queen of the Prom’. This strikes me as being not dissimilar to the way in which, during the Roman fertility festival of the Lupercalia on 15 February every year, men were obliged to draw the name of a young woman in a lottery, which would designate them as partners for the duration of festivities or, depending on which source you read, the entire year.

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There is another custom here indirectly linking Valentine’s Day to the cockfight. On Shrove Tuesday (which takes place somewhere between 5 February and 9 March each year, forty-seven days before Easter), in the time of Henry II, boys would participate in the ‘Camilvaria’ in which they pitted cocks against one another. The ‘Valentine season’ sees a marked increase in the number of marriage proposals (as it does in the United States where six million couples get engaged on Valentine’s Day – 40 per cent of the annual total of fourteen million engagements every year). It seems that Filipinos like to celebrate their marriage on or near a special date (Christmas is another favourite). Some municipalities and cities offer special deals in February, when dozens of couples are married together on the same day, and can take advantage of free-of-charge wedding paraphernalia – including wedding cake, banquet, even rings. All couples need to do is register and show their personal documents ahead of time, and then turn up in formal attire on the day itself. In a successful attempt to regain the Philippines’ place in the Guinness Book of World Records, 6,124 couples locked lips in a pre-Valentine’s Day ‘Lovepalooza’ in the SM Mall of Asia, Pasay City, on 10 February 2017. As with many rituals, therefore, Valentine’s Day is used to manage emotions underpinning the organisation of society. In addition to being a seasonal holiday with both national and religious overlay, Valentine’s Day is integrated into the country’s popular cultural forms focusing on love and romance. I’ve yet to see anyone in Bibiclat reading a book, but Nana tells me that before the days of social media, people would read romance pocket novels; nothing else. Every evening’s fare on the main television channel focuses on teleserie romance dramas – Halik, Wild Flower, The Good Son, and so on. Each of these brings to the fore themes of love, family and betrayal and, although it would seem fairly clear where each plot is headed, Nana and Blessica, among many others here, stay glued to the TV screen every evening. These teleserie also act as an important means by which to bind together overseas foreign workers. All the domestic helpers I knew in Mui Wo would diligently follow these romantic stories to their – often bitter – end, generally through pirated versions posted on Facebook and other websites. This linking of romance with violence and death is almost sacred (some teleserie – like Probinshyanos – integrate the two), and is – surely – as near a universal as anything. It’s found in almost every syrupy pop song which transforms the everyday trials of teenage life into threeminute operas, played out through earphones in the head or sung aloud by – mainly female – wistful adults as they go about their daily

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chores. Love helps overcome the hopelessness and fear of death, of the extinction of our physical selves. So it is with Valentine’s Day, which – or so the story goes – celebrates the death and martyrdom of the Roman saint, Valentinus, who was beheaded on the orders of the Emperor Claudius II, on the Via Flaminia on 14 February 269 (or 271) ad. His final note is said to have been written to the daughter of the judge Asterius, whose sight he had restored (and with whom it is said he’d fallen in love). It was signed: ‘From your Valentine’. As with many traditions – the Scottish kilt, the British royal family, or the courtly love of early Japanese warriors (later known as samurai) – this tale is in large part an ‘invention’: a figment of social imagination, a post-rationalisation used to justify current practice. Other elements have been added to strengthen the association between love and Valentine (who may have been not one person, but two). On the one hand, 14 February has been linked to the Lupercalia, the Roman ‘lovers’ festival’; on the other, to Valentine’s opposition to the Emperor Claudius II’s ban on marriage on the grounds that husbands didn’t make good soldiers. Like all invented traditions, as Forbes points out in his book on America’s favourite holidays, the ritual that we participate in today probably owes its origins to a much later period of history, when Chaucer wrote poems about courtly love and noble chivalry in the Middle Ages, as an alternative to the common practice of arranged marriage that prevailed at the time. Writing about courtly love in itself had existed before Chaucer, of course, but the English bard linked romance to a specific season, spring – something that hadn’t been done before. He and his poet friends succeeded in giving passionate and spiritual love a special day on the ritual calendar. Looking for an alternative to arranged marriage might in part explain young women’s whole-hearted adoption of Valentine’s Day as a lovers’ day in Japan back in the 1960s, when the o-miai form of arranged marriage prevailed. At the same time, though, we should recognise that the popularity of Valentine’s Day was underpinned by a successful marketing ploy to revitalise Japan’s chocolate industry – by having women give men chocolates on 14 February, followed by men returning white chocolates to women one month later, on 14 March. It would be nice to link all this with the naming of Valentine Morozoff, the brother of a close White Russian friend of mine living now in northern California, but, while Morozoff was one of the larger chocolate companies to benefit from this marketing ploy, Valentine himself was born well before it took place. Still, maybe it was his name

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that inspired his father to choose 14 February, rather than Easter – say – or any other festival. I haven’t enquired. Forbes provides further illumination to remove the romance from the story of romance: It is difficult to identify exactly when and by whom various romantic embellishments to the legend of Saint Valentine were added. However, any mentions of Valentine performing underground weddings, or falling in love with the jailor’s daughter, or writing a note signed ‘from your Valentine’ emerge after the era of Chaucer, in some cases much later. Not to be too cynical, but it appears that once Valentine’s name became associated with an annual recognition of romance, people were desperate to find some aspect of Valentine’s life and legend that would explain the association. If nothing could be found in the historical record, human imaginations managed to make things up.

In other words, as in many other aspects of our lives, a lot of post-rationalisation has taken place. What this particular postrationalisation does, though, is bring in the death of a saint to justify love and the sacred rite of marriage. The sacred, then – often an act of violence associated with sacrifice – is inseparable from the social. It lies at the heart of secular and non-secular societies alike, as new collective rituals are introduced while older ones are rewritten in our social consciousness.

33

Crispin, Caesar and Cecilio Out on my late afternoon walk, and on my way home I come across a man and his wife taking off their Wellington boots by their tricycle, after wading in from their rice fields. I’m about to ask how he is in Tagalog, when he looks up and says in quite good English, ‘How are you?’ And so a conversation begins, with me commending him on his English, which really is quite fluent, and saying how nobody in Bibiclat speaks like him. ‘Really?’ He asks. ‘But all Filipinos speak English. We learn it at school. All our lessons are in English’. ‘That may be’, I counter, ‘but they quickly forget it’. He laughs, and adjusts the glasses on his nose, before admitting, ‘Well, I spent sixteen years in the US. Maybe that helps’. It transpires that Cecilio (that is his name) worked as a caretaker in a Jewish synagogue in Washington DC. ‘It was a job’, he says simply. ‘And now I’m a farmer here. But I think we met before?’ I look confused. ‘You were walking on the road coming from the Bucot direction. Together with your wife. I live out there, in a blue house on the right, next to a yellow one, before the village water pump station. It’s nice and cool out there. Not like the village centre’. ‘Anyway’, he continues, ‘I’d just finished righting my tricycle when you came by. I’d been forced off the road and driven into a ditch when we met a motorcyclist without lights in the dark, and I had to swerve to avoid killing him. The idiot! He never even stopped to see if we were OK’.

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Suddenly I recall the event. It must have been back before the New Year when we encountered them, shaken, with a cut in Cecilio’s brow, but otherwise not seriously hurt. As we talked, Nana had discovered that Cecilio’s wife, Hermi, had cousins living next door, so a connection of the kind necessary in village relations was established. And now we meet again, and part with promises that I’ll visit his house or they ours soon. When I get home and tell Nana this, she starts to put on an actor’s declamatory voice, saying ‘Where are you, my sons – Crispin and Cecilio?’ before continuing in her normal tone, ‘Do you know that story? They were Caesar’s sons, and were taken away from their mother by the Japanese’. I look confused. ‘Oh no!’ She laughs and puts her hand to her mouth. ‘It wasn’t Cecilio, was it?’ ‘Basilio!’ says Blessica. ‘Yes, Crispin and Basilio!’ ‘But what has Caesar got to do with the Japanese?’ I ask. ‘She was their mother’, Gina says, as if I ought to know better. ‘Caesar? A woman?’ ‘Of course!’ She gives me one of her more piercing ‘are you such a fool?’ looks, before adding by way of clarification. ‘Mothers are always women’. In a flash of inspiration, I ask how Caesar is spelt. ‘S-I-S-A. How else?’ I should have realised that, for all his military prowess, the Roman emperor hadn’t managed to lead an army of Japanese across Asia and discover the Philippines, a millennium and and a half before Magellan. As for the story of Crispin and Cecilio-cum-Basilio, well, let’s leave that until another day, since nobody bothered to complete it for me! But not before noting how Shakespearian some names are here. One of the workers, remember, is called Boshio. Other names I’ve come across include Rodolfo, Querico, Virgilio, Felicísimo and – my favourite for any villain – Vitriolo.

34

Drugs I suppose no account of life in the Philippines towards the end of the second decade of the new millennium should ignore the subject of drugs. Rodrigo Duterte won the presidential election in 2016, mainly as a result of his promise to crack down on use of drugs and the cartels supplying them. Actually, he was a bit more outspoken than this. He promised to kill tens of thousands of those he regarded as criminals, and urged local people to take the law into their own hands and kill all drug addicts. This has been condemned in most parts of the world, mainly because Duterte’s ‘war on drugs’ seems to be making use of extrajudicial ‘death squads’, of the kind made famous in the city of Davos where he was previously mayor. All this seems a far cry from everyday life in Bibiclat. Nana laughingly says that Kambal may have on occasion smoked cannabis, together with her brother Darius. When I ask Malou if that’s true, she says: ‘Ask Kambal!’, before adding, ‘Nobody in a village like this is going to accuse anyone else of taking drugs. There isn’t even gossip about drugs’. Yet you quite often come across road signs and slogans, often in red and black or red and green block capital letters, declaring that local barangay leaders will not tolerate drugs: ‘No drug user grow old because they die young’, warns one. ‘Stop drugs. Keep the barangay clean & green’, orders another. ‘Drugs Ends All Dreams’, declares a third. One has the feeling, though, that a lot of these slogans are put up by local government officials eager to be seen to be doing the ‘right’ thing, rather than because their barangay is actually a centre of drug

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peddling and abuse. In this respect, the Philippine political scene differs little from those found in other parts of Asia – mainland China, Japan or Singapore, for example. What should be is more important than what actually is. That such public pronouncements are in fact just that – pronouncements – would seem to be borne out by what goes on in everyday life. At this point, though, we come to a horrendous event close to home, directly affecting Nana’s family. It’s worth recounting because it reveals the potential violence underlying the smiling faces and apparent happiness of people’s everyday lives here. Sometime in the late autumn of 2017 – a year after Duterte came to power – Teté’s husband, Felix, had a nap after lunching at home with his wife, together with their daughter YoYo and grand-daughter, Sunshine (of cake eating renown). Later, he got up and went out of the back of his house to a piece of land he owned nearby. There he was due to meet someone who was going to help him harvest his rice. He walked past the pig pens, through a banana tree copse, across a track, and into his fields. A short while later, a motorbike drew up. Its rider – helmeted with a dark visor to prevent recognition – dismounted, Figure 34.1. ‘ No drug user grow old’. © Brian Moeran.

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walked over to where Felix was standing waiting, drew a pistol from his waistband, and shot him six times. Felix died immediately. The murderer, it seems, calmly went back to his motorbike, restarted the engine, and drove away – at a speed that didn’t attract any attention. Nobody noticed him; nobody could later give a description of him. Or of what exactly had happened. The police arrived in due course, but their report was scant in detail, probably read by a superior, stamped, and is now, presumably, resting along with numerous other unsolved murder cases in a filing cabinet in the nearest police station. Felix’s murder didn’t warrant their attention, apart from the necessary formalities, although it may well have been used to add one more number to the drug murder statistics in the province of Nueva Ecija. What are we to make of this? In Hong Kong, Nana and I got news of what had happened more or less immediately (thanks to social media), early that same Saturday evening. Felix was a delightful man, with whom I had quickly bonded when we first met a few months previously and discovered not only that we were both Aquarians, but that we’d been born on the same day in late January (albeit in different years). It wasn’t difficult for me to share in Nana’s grief. The word out at the time was that Felix was killed because he was a drug user. But Felix had never taken drugs in his life, apart from smoking cannabis twice when he was a teenager some three decades earlier (and he had an official certificate to attest that he wasn’t a drug user). Teté herself didn’t have the necessary clout to push the police to conduct more than a cursory ‘investigation’, or persuade a local politician to take up her cause. Felix was simply expunged – not just from physical, but from documentary, existence. Later, Teté began to suggest that somebody had killed Felix because they were jealous of his success as a farmer. This might sound improbable to someone who lives in the relative security of a north European country, but it’s the kind of suggestion that makes sense here. Felix wasn’t rich; both his sisters are far better off than he was, because they ‘married well’. But he was successful at what he did. Not only did he work hard in his fields, he reared pigs which he sold for a good price every six months or so. Like every good husband and father, he made sure there was enough food on the table for his wife and four sons, and that they were properly clothed when they went to school. But could this in itself have inspired jealousy and envy enough in a rural village, where inequality is rife and readily visible, to have him killed? I wouldn’t know. But I’ve noted that the offshoot of romance,

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passion, can quickly metamorphose into violence – as several Spanish poets and film-makers (García Lorca, Saura, Almodóvar) have vividly shown us. The sabong cockfight illustrates this tendency, as, more prosaically, do the not infrequent extrajudicial killings of politicians and their chauffeurs during election periods in the Philippines. I suspect that one reason the police didn’t bother to pursue Felix’s killer was Duterte’s war on drugs. Felix was murdered at a time when hundreds of ‘drug users’ were being killed every month – on the blanket orders of the President of the Philippines. This meant that it was easy for someone with a grudge to murder another and get away with it, on the grounds – which didn’t have to be proven – that the victim was taking or selling drugs. So, while the war on drugs may be having an effect and diminishing both drug use and drug users in the country, it has encouraged another kind of lawlessness. Felix’s death was an unintended consequence of Duterte’s measures: the kind of consequence that often comes to light when something – a development aid programme, for example – is diligently pursued by a journalist or researcher in depth and over time. Anthropologists conducting long-term fieldwork often find themselves entangled in such unanticipated twists and turns of life. But is there, in fact, a drug problem? Duterte himself has suggested that there are 3.7 million users in the Philippines. But, according to the government’s own drug policy-making body, under two million Filipinos were using illegal drugs (mostly cannabis) in 2015; a third of this number had taken them only once in the previous thirteen months. In other words, regular drug users constitute less than 2 per cent of the population. Compare this with the 24.6 million users – or 9.4 per cent of the population – in the United States, and one in twelve adults aged sixteen to fifty-nine (8.5 per cent) in the UK. When I mention this to Nana, she replies: ‘Well, maybe it’s because of the kind of drugs they use’. But cannabis appears to be the main substance used here, even though its medicinal and recreational use is being decriminalised in one or two countries around the world. According to official police reports, over 5,100 drug suspects had been killed as of January 2019 (one of whom may, or may not, have been Felix). Human rights and media organisations suggest that the figure is closer to 12,000; political opponents 20,000. As in most things in life, accounts differ, depending on which political or intellectual spectrum you speak from. What’s clear is that Duterte himself has encouraged the extrajudicial shootings by offering police a bounty for dead suspects (a bounty that is enhanced, it’s said, by kickbacks from the funeral parlours to which police send their dead), and has named

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as suspects local politicians, police, judges and senior members of the armed forces. A full catalogue of incidents detailing who has done what to whom, when and where in the drug war over the past three years isn’t my intent here. Amnesty International has investigated a number of drug-related killings throughout the country and concluded that ‘the police have systematically targeted mostly poor and defenceless people across the country while planting “evidence”, recruiting paid killers, stealing from the people they kill and fabricating official incident reports’. However great the outrage of foreign governments and human rights organisations at Duterte’s war on drugs, the government of the Philippines is, I think, entitled to do what it thinks is in the best interests of its people, so long as the people approve. And the public does seem generally content with – or, at least, doesn’t openly object to – the nightly TV news fare of yet another drug bust, arrest or murder. It certainly approves of Duterte as their President. When I ask Teté if she regards Duterte as indirectly responsible for her husband’s death, she’s silent for a moment. Then she says: ‘Someone was jealous of him’. But she still has tears in her eyes when she, and those around her, talk about Felix. And it’s not surprising. One day when we’re alone together, Nana tells me the story of why Teté is convinced that jealousy was responsible for her husband’s death. It’s a story that shows that the slogan ‘family is love’ – like barangay drug warnings – is little more than a slogan, and not something that necessarily pervades the workings of everyday life. Teté lives in Felix’s family compound, her house flanked by two more, one each side, belonging to Felix’s older and younger sisters. As I’ve already explained, this is the kind of arrangement many families have here. Brothers and sisters – even cousins, uncles and aunts – live cheek by jowl, in a functional arrangement that allows food to be cooked and shared, and children looked after when parents go to work in Manila or abroad. Teté’s house wasn’t – still isn’t – legally her own. And thereby hangs this tale. And, as every outsider soon discovers, the tale is both confusing and confused. What follows, therefore, cannot be termed a ‘definitive’ account, but it’s an account, I think, that bears narrating. Felix once had an uncle called Angelo, who had married the sister of his father, Marc. At one point, Angelo agreed to let his brother-inlaw make use of ten hectares of land he owned in Visario, where he

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himself no longer lived. Marc built a house there and farmed the rest. Upon his death, the land was divided among the six offspring. Felix then built a house and farmed his one plus hectare share, while his siblings did the same. All was well until both Marc and Angelo – the two witnesses to the original transaction – died. Things in fact continued quite amicably, but with two developments. First, Angelo’s son built up substantial gambling debts and, while desperately seeking a solution to his financial woes, discovered that the ten hectares of land being used by his cousins was in fact legally his, not theirs. He therefore demanded that each of them pay him for their share of his land, in exchange for title deeds. Since he knew that most of the Rosario family didn’t have enough cash to pay him outright, he agreed to a long-term repayment from those who, like Felix, couldn’t muster a lump sum of P250,000 (£4,000). It’s this agreement that Teté is now honouring. Second, at one point Felix agreed to lend his younger sister some of the land behind his house. This sister’s husband had died a few years earlier and she’d re-married a former policeman, who quickly established a reputation in the village as being a ‘greedy’ man (perhaps a qualification for the job in the Philippines police force, to gather by its reputation for a willingness to accept bribes). When, after a few years, Felix asked his sister to return the land she’d borrowed from him, her husband refused, saying that Felix had sold them the land. Somehow, he persuaded Felix’s siblings to sign a letter to that effect, and presented it to the barangay captain in Visoria, arguing that the piece of land Felix had lent them was not his, but theirs. One important part of every barangay captain’s job is to adjudicate fairly in matters of land and other village disputes. In this case, the captain listened to both sides of the argument and, in the summer before the defendant was murdered, declared that it was impossible for Felix to have sold the land in question to his sister and brotherin-law, as they claimed, because he didn’t have the deeds to the land. The brother-in-law’s plan to take over the land next to his house was thwarted. Three months later, however, Felix was murdered and the village gossip, carefully manipulated it seems, suggested drugs as the cause. The fact that the police didn’t bother to investigate beyond gathering a few facts of the incident suggests that the brother-in-law may have pulled in a few favours earned over his twenty years of service in the police force. Of course, this is all conjecture based on quite a lot of hearsay evidence. The brother-in-law may be entirely innocent. I wouldn’t

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know. Felix’s murder may have been totally random, carried out by somebody who believed he was a drug user and who took advantage of Duterte’s official stance on drugs to get rid of him. Again, I wouldn’t know. The positive outcome of this sad story is that Teté is now able to legalise the ownership of her house and its surrounding piece of land, although the full sum has yet to be paid off. She’s being helped financially by one of her daughters, Ronalene, and her husband who are now working in Canada and are able to remit money back home every month. A negative outcome, however, has recently emerged. In December 2018, soon after I arrived in Bibiclat, a woman whom she knew in the village told Teté that an unknown man on a motorbike had been asking where she lived. This isn’t the kind of question that gets asked in a rural community and quickly aroused suspicion – especially because the interlocutor was a motorcyclist with helmet, making his facial features difficult to identify. Understandably, Teté became very nervous. Was somebody out to murder her, too? This fear has grown in recent weeks. There’s a second report circulating in Visoria that the unknown motorcyclist has been back and asked again about Teté’s whereabouts. To her credit, Teté decided to face those who told her this, and asked them who they’d heard this information from. She was passed on from one person to another, with nobody willing to admit to having talked directly to the phantom motorcyclist – until one woman said that, yes, she’d been approached by him while going for a walk from her house to a neighbouring kiosk one morning. However, this ‘informant’ had had a mild stroke a few years back and, as a result, is unable to walk unaided. So she’s always accompanied by her daughter when she ventures out of the house, and the daughter, as Teté quickly discovered, had no recollection of her mother being approached by any motorcyclist. In other words, it would seem that a covert form of intimidation is being carried out. Someone is making use of the propensity for gossip availed of by every country villager by spreading a rumour that, hopefully, will drive Teté out of her house to live elsewhere. After all, even though Bibiclat is just a one-hour walk away, she’s still an ‘outsider’ who married into Visoria. But who would want to intimidate her? More importantly, who is capable of such intimidation? Once again, the most likely culprit is a jealous brother-in-law who has had a twenty-year career in the police force, where intimidation is the norm, rather than the exception.

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Nana’s advice to Teté, like that of her other siblings, is: hurry up and fill in the application forms that will allow Teté to join her daughter in Canada. My question, to which I’ve yet to receive an answer, is: what will happen to Teté’s third son, Ace, and his younger brother, Sherwin, after their mother leaves? Won’t they in turn be intimidated? So many imponderables. But of one thing I can be certain. The idea that ‘family is love’ is not universally practiced here in the Philippines, in spite of all assertions to the contrary. People are never as perfect as they’d have us believe.

35

Cementeries Cemeteries here are very visible – clearly distinguishable by their lines of cemented concrete sepulchres, white for the most part, but also in eye-catching colours of avocado green, orange ochre and sky blue. Sometimes, as with the cemetery on the coast road soon after entering Subic Bay or high up overlooking the Pantabanang reservoir, they tumble down hillsides, but in the rice basin of Nueva Ecija they line roadsides and irrigated rice fields outside each barangay. I came across Marlon’s new girlfriend, Jonalene, again a week or two later, when I decided to pay another visit to the Bibiclat cemetery. This is located at least a mile out of town – half a mile towards Bucot on the Aliaga-Cabanatuan road, and then another half mile to the left through rice fields, along a dirt track that passes a hamlet of fairly dishevelled homes just before the cemetery itself. What the houses lacked in attractiveness, however, was more than compensated for by the noisy barking of their dogs and quite vicious baring of sharp teeth. I was quite relieved to get past the last house, with its carabao tied up under an acacia tree beside it, and reach the cemetery – by then accompanied by two small boys on a bicycle who kept repeating something to me in Tagalog that I didn’t understand. I have an anthropologist colleague, originally from East Germany back in the day, who invariably visits a supermarket immediately after arriving in a foreign country. ‘Supermarkets tell you a lot about a people’s culture’, he explained when I asked him why. And he was right. I’ve learned to follow his practice now whenever I go abroad, and vividly recall shelf after shelf of different cheeses,

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charcuterie delicacies, and unheard of vineyard wines in French supermarkets, as well as the enormous wooden boxes filled with rice from which shoppers in Hangzhou ladled out the amounts they needed. Here in the Philippines you find row upon row of instant noodles, snacks and crisps; long life milk; hair care products; and detergents; and, of Monty Python notoriety, Spam. Cooking oil comes in 10 or 15 litre bottles and rice in 25 kilogram bags. Supermarket shelves reveal that Filipinos eat a lot of rice, use a lot of cooking oil, eat a lot of snack food, and pay particular attention to cleanliness. They wash their clothes and hair almost every day without fail. And they love to eat wonderfully tasty Spam! Cemeteries, too, can be culturally informative. From Melbourne to my own village of Moretonhampstead, from Highgate to Bibiclat, cemeteries tell us how we remember and honour the dead – and which dead, too. In most countries, gravestones memorialise man and wife, and sometimes their children, by individual name, but sometimes it’s the name of the first ancestor who is honoured, even though others are buried with him (and in Japan and China the senior ancestor is very much a ‘he’). Elsewhere, a plot of land is set apart for a whole family, and some bodies – or their ashes – are taken hundreds of miles to ensure that they’re placed in the family grave so that the deceased can join their forebears.

Figure 35.1. Bibiclat cemetery. © Brian Moeran.

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Some of the larger cemeteries allocate different areas to different faiths – protestants here, Jewish there, Catholics in another area, and Orthodox in yet another. Very often, ethnic groups abroad adopt burial practices from their home countries – palatial marble homes for Italian families; simple oblong vertical stones for Chinese. Some place photos of the deceased on the stones marking their graves; others are content with dates and names. A common name in Denmark was what struck me as the rather un-Scandinavian abbreviation of Frederik to Fred. I eventually learned that fred meant ‘peace’! Cemeteries in Bibiclat, and the rest of Luzon, are filled with structures that can be best described, I think, as ‘massive’, although they have not, so far as I know, attracted the attention and designs of architects as they have elsewhere. Not only do you find family ‘tombs’ there, whose walls and roofs are far sturdier than the houses of the living; the dead aren’t buried underground, but housed in heavy concrete sepulchres (no polished marble here) on family plots of land. These are often whitewashed, and have the names of the deceased at one end – Felísima T. Vero, Pablo Flores Paquio, Wenceslas A. Madrano – and occasionally, for those recently deceased, a poster photograph from the funeral parlour to which their body was consigned. Each cemented sepulchre is closed. Bodies are left there in their caskets for between five and seven years, after which time it’s considered acceptable to open them at one end, gather the bones and collect them in one corner of the sepulchre, and so leave room for a new addition as necessary. Then the opening is cemented up. In this respect, the Spanish for cemetery, cementerio (sementeryo in Tagalog), could hardly be more apt. When someone dies, their body lies ‘in state’ at home for nine days – during which time, as I mentioned earlier, nobody cleans any of the rooms. This is how long it takes for the soul to detach itself from the body and go to Heaven, or so it’s believed, and next-of-kin wear black headbands and pin black ribbons to their chests (unless the deceased is a child or very young, when black is exchanged for white). During this period, relatives, friends and neighbours will gather in the evenings at a wake to honour the deceased. But first, mourners should step over a fire lit in front of the deceased’s house and then wash their hands in water with guava or duhat (Jambolan or Java plum) leaves in order to purify themselves. Then they raise one hand of the corpse to be blessed. Small children are lifted up and passed over the coffin from one side to the other. Once such greetings are over, mourners chat quietly with one another and are served snacks and soft drinks by the next-of-kin. Many will play card games like Lucky Nine and

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gamble the evening away. On the last night before burial, a second wake will be far less subdued, as music is played and people dance. The funeral is preceded by a ‘long march’ through various streets of the barangay – there’s no fixed route, but the coffin always ends up at a church. It heads the procession and is followed by a crowd of mourners, for the most part in their colourful everyday clothes (T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops), walking with umbrellas up to protect themselves from the sun. Then comes the ‘band’ – three or four men with drums, trumpets and maybe a flute or saxophone – after which come tricycles, cars and even the occasional bus bringing up the rear. A funeral procession, therefore, may easily extend over two hundred metres in length, and is watched by those whom it passes by from inside their homes. It isn’t proper to go out and take a good look, in the way that I myself did the first time such a procession went by our house. Every cemetery has its stories to tell. But, in fact, it rarely provides finished tales, with beginning, middle and end to satisfy the curious enquirer. Rather, like witch doctors and other kinds of magicians, cemeteries reveal their secrets while simultaneously concealing them from further scrutiny. A photograph of Diana Tupas Cajucom, who had been recently buried in the Bibiclat cemetery at the age of twentyseven, was of a local girl – a woman living beside the cemetery told me – who’d died of TB earlier that year. She knew nothing, though, of another photograph nearby – of one Leonardo J. Custodio, which told us us that this young man was born on 7 December 1990 and died on 24 June 2018, also only twenty seven and a half years old. It did not, however, tell us what brought his short life to an abrupt end. Was it illness? A motorbike accident? Or was he, perhaps, a drug user – the target of yet another extrajudicial killing? The cemetery in Bibiclat doesn’t provide answers to such questions. For these I need to enquire of the living (who may, or may not, know who is who and how they died). It merely hints at, and thereby reinforces, the mystery of death, marking who is buried where, without revealing them physically. Sepulchres conceal. They are, indeed, ‘crypts’ for those who, when dead, can join Christ and have their ‘revelation’. While it has its grand constructions, carefully painted in bright greens, reds and salmon pink – especially those sepulchres along the roadside – most of the burial sites in the Bibiclat cemetery are crammed together in a fairly simple style. This one would expect of a farming village, where extreme wealth – and its accompanying display – are misplaced. Agapito’s and Arsenia’s tombs lie in a

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narrow corner plot, the walls of which have been hastily built of breeze blocks to knee height and then left unfinished. Nana says that every year, on All Souls Day, when the family gathers, there’s much talk of raising money among them to finish off the family grave house. Everyone agrees this should be done; everyone agrees to contribute some money; but somehow nothing ever comes of it. Maybe that is something for me to ensure gets done. After all, Nana will eventually – later, rather than sooner, I hope – be buried here with her parents, brothers, at least one of her sisters, and probably, much, much later, her nieces and nephews. Viola’s husband, Gusto, buried his parents here some years ago – a decision that led to him and Agapito buying this corner plot together for the Simbulan and Aquinez families. They deserve a little better than two massive slabs of whitewashed concrete. As I strolled among the sepulchres, noting down names, absorbing the atmosphere of peace that seems to embrace every burial place I know, I noticed some children hiding among the structures, occasionally peeking out to observe what I was up to. At one point, I heard them slowly coming closer behind me, whispering and laughing as they did so. When I turned round, the oldest of the group – an attractive girl in her late teens – came forward to take my hand. ‘Bless, Un-kel’, She said. Who was this? Luckily, she provided an answer for me. ‘Marlon on duty today’. The penny dropped. This was Marlon’s new girlfriend, Jonalene – hitherto concealed by darkness, but now revealed in all her beauty in the full light of day. It transpired that she lived in the hamlet full of threatening dogs that had barked at me all the way to the cemetery. At the time, I hadn’t seen a single person in the houses bordering the track, apart from the two small boys on their bicycle who had spoken only Tagalog and who’d followed me until I shooed them away. Now they were back with Jonalene, and two of her friends. Together we walked back the way I’d come. The empty hamlet was now full of people standing in groups chatting or squatting over their mobile phones at the roadside. Others pretended to be busy sharpening tools or cooking food, but all were, without exception, watching ‘the kano’ who, they now knew, was the ‘unkel’ of Jonalene’s new boyfriend. They smiled or nodded as I passed. Even the dogs let me go by in silence without barking. There’s a coda to this entry and it relates back to drugs. Two days after I had visited the Bibiclat cemetery, in the same place and at more or less the same time in the late afternoon, a motorcyclist

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was shot and killed by three men in a large car with tinted windows. The police eventually turned up, asked questions and tried to interview witnesses. As is usual here, nobody knew anything. They didn’t want to get involved because they knew that the victim, who was from the next barangay, was a drug user and minor dealer who’d failed to pay what he owed to a bigger dealer. The latter, it’s said, despatched three men to put matters right. So, there’s one more death to add to Duterte’s statistics.

36

Security Guards My first visit to the Philippines many years ago, when Ferdinand Marcos was still President, was unanticipated. I’d been trying to get to Tokyo from London, but the Sabena flight to Brussels, where I was due to change planes, was delayed. We missed our Tokyo flight and ended up on a ‘city hopper’ that stopped, if memory serves me aright, four times before we finally arrived – more or less twenty-four hours later – in Manila. There we were taken to a hotel. Outside its entrance was a security guard who ordered us to deposit our pistols or other guns in the half-full box on the table in front of him. I remember laughing at the notion of carrying a weapon. But then I’m not an American. What prompted this recollection? The pervasive presence of security guards here. Wherever you go, you find them in their smart uniforms – sweeping the undersides of cars as you drive into a car park, casually checking with swagger sticks the contents of your bag and putting a hand on the back of your waist to check for weapons as you go into a shopping mall. The checks are more a formality than made with intent to search and are always accompanied by a polite ‘Good morning, sir’, ‘Good afternoon, madam’. As a foreigner, I usually pass through without a male security guard bothering to check my waist. Women guards, though, seem to relish the opportunity to briefly touch a foreign man, although they do so with the modest decorum expected of their job. Security guards are found mainly in and around shopping malls – I reckon that the SM Mall in Cabanatuan has half a dozen guards with pump action shotguns patrolling the above- and below-ground car parks, and a dozen more around its perimeter checking all those

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going into the shopping complex. Then there are probably another dozen wandering aimlessly around inside, while most of the larger stores (including Starbucks) have one guard posted at their entrance. Clearly, the aim is to make people feel safe in a society renowned for drug abuse and violence, and where, over several decades, martial law has been imposed by various democratically elected presidents, including Duterte (in the southern island of Mindanao). Security guards, then, are ubiquitous here – in and outside banks, hardware stores, car retail sales outlets, all-purpose chemist stores – and are employed by security companies to guard them. One of their jobs is to check all purchases. One guard at Willcon, a glorified B&Q selling everything for the building, decoration and maintenance of homes, opens the door and welcomes you as you go in. Another checks all your purchases in the shopping trolley against your receipt, as you go out. Occasionally, as at S&R, a large wholesale warehouse that sells everything from air conditioners and garden furniture to food and household goods, an employee will do this, but always within sight of a nearby security guard who watches all the while. This isn’t as over-the-top as one might at first think. Twice now, a guard checking our purchases has spotted a mistake – once a very Figure 36.1. Security guard at local shopping mall. © Brian Moeran.

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large one against us – in the goods we were taking out after paying the cashier. I’ve noticed that guards also frisk all employees whenever they leave their store, to make sure that they’re not pilfering any goods. Guards, then, come across as protecting customers in large stores and malls. Different security firms provide their employees with different uniforms, although the differences are often hard to spot – a light blue, rather than white, shirt here; a sleeve badge there. All companies, however, share the single aim of ready visibility: dark trousers, polished (plastic) black shoes or boots; off white or white shirts with buttoned pocket on each side, topped by a ribbon with the name of guard on the right side and that of the security firm on the left. Above this, a shiny gold sheriff-like badge, while opposite, on the left below the shoulder, a blue badge with the word Padpao, referring to an official government agency. There are two more badges at the top of the left and right arm: for the security company again, on one; and for a national government security agency, on the other. Each guard has a black or dark blue epaulette round the left shoulder. Its braided cord ends up in the left breast pocket and has keys and, possibly, a whistle on the end of it hidden inside. Their belts carry a holstered pistol on the right, a pair of handcuffs in the middle of the back, and what looks like a stun gun on the left. Guards wear black net-top peaked caps, black ties, and the lapels of their shirts carry the same sheriff-badge type of gleaming gold insignia. A plastic name badge hangs from around the neck. There are variations, of course (my description here is of two guards in Starbucks). Instead of handcuffs, the guards who check all people entering the mall have small Black Cross First Aid pouches attached to their belts at the back. These guards have a gold band lining the peak of their caps, as well as a dozen bullets inserted into their belts. They also carry a torch, a truncheon and – if they’re senior enough – a walkie talkie, although who they talk to is unclear since hardly any other guards have one! Women guards wear low heels and tie their hair into a bun behind their cap, or underneath a kind of Australian Outback floppy black hat with rim all round. Make-up seems to be essential – especially red lipstick. While I was waiting for Nana in Starbucks, a security guard struck up a conversation with me (I was sitting by the door) and, after the usual questions about where I came from and how long I’d been here, I asked him a bit about his job. He said he was well paid, all things considered, and earned 5–7,000 pesos every fifteen days (still

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only about 400 pesos a day). In a way, the job was quite boring since nothing ever happened much, apart from the occasional customer shoplifting or trying to leave Starbucks without paying. When I asked about using the pistol in the holster at his waist, he said a bit ruefully: ‘I’ve never shot my gun in three years. Haven’t even taken it out of the holster’. Nana’s younger brother, Darius, is a security guard working privately for a Chinese employer who runs a casino in Manila and, it seems, a considerable and illegal on-line betting business. Dar’s job is to ‘guard’ a large house where up to forty Chinese workers sleep between shifts – half of them during the night; the other half during daylight hours. They’re looked after by a couple of housekeepers, who cook their meals and change their bedding from time to time, and by Dar and a fellow villager from Bibiclat who work day and night shifts at the entrance to the house, logging in the names of all those going in and out. In fact, the guards form a second line of security, since the Chinese employer’s house is located in a gated community with its own security guards. Dar’s job is fairly relaxed. He doesn’t have to wear a uniform other than white shirt and dark trousers. He gets free board and lodging, and a monthly salary of 12,000 pesos (£200) which goes towards his family’s food and teenage children’s education expenses back in Bibiclat. His only concern is that his employer doesn’t bother to get the necessary documentation for his workers, some of whom are staying in the country illegally. He also suspects that, in addition to an illegal betting business, the Chinese might be involved in drugs – a sphere of criminality often attributed by Filipinos to Chinese and Koreans. This may be true – I’ve no idea – but this attribution of criminal drug activities to foreigners is found all over the world: witness Trump’s populist rhetoric about migrant caravans, drug traffickers and the need for a wall between Mexico and the United States. As I said, this kind of fear-mongering goes on everywhere in the world, although it’s often less strident. Outsiders are usually feared and mistrusted. They’re often seen to be dangerous to society, which must be made to follow certain cultural guidelines and thereby be the more easily controlled by those who would wield status and power over the masses. Anarchy, chaos, lawlessness, turmoil, discord – these must be avoided at all costs. And yet, at the same time, outsiders can be valued. The sanyasi of India and shamans in north-east Siberia have been seen as providing something essential to the vitality of community life, precisely because they’re set apart. The same may be said of the Fool in European courts

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and, perhaps, of Ipen who lived by the river and cut off Tuto’s foreskin many years ago. So strangers, in Hortense Powdermaker’s phrase, can also become friends – as I have myself experienced while living here. People may be shy, but they’re friendly towards the stranger from another part of the world (although it helps, I suspect, to be old, male and white). This doesn’t mean, though, that I cease to be an outsider. When I lived in the Ono Valley in Japan back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the local people referred to my next door neighbour, who’d been born in a hamlet a few miles up the valley and who had moved down to our community when his house burned down twenty-two years previously, as ‘that guy who recently arrived here’. Similarly, in an Irish community in County Clare studied by Conrad Arensberg back in the mid-1930s, someone who’d moved into the area fifty years previously was still referred to as the ‘stranger’. Strangers are part of every community’s social discourse. They help participants define their ‘insiderness’. Like security guards in the local Cabanatuan or Talavera mall, members of every community act as guards, charged with the protection of invisible borders involving appearance, expression and ways of behaviour. As in many parts of the world, people are at the same time extremely hospitable to strangers and welcome them into their homes. Strangers fascinate: they’re capable of expanding the views of those among whom they reside – something that Nana and others like her also do as a result of their having lived and worked abroad for many years. But strangers also make people feel uncomfortable, because they cause them to question their own views (‘Oh George!’). Both Nana’s family and friends, and I myself, are involved in familiarity and strangeness. Indeed, since we come from totally different educational, social and cultural backgrounds, Nana and I are constantly trying to understand why we behave as we do. We engage with each other’s strangeness, making each other ‘more like us’, and so transform strangeness into familiarity through intellectual and emotional understanding. That is at a personal level. But at a professional level, my task in describing my life here is not only to make the familiar strange, but the strange familiar. Neither, then, is fixed; each is a shifting category. With time, familiarity can become strangeness (as when you return to the land of your birth, as I have done, after having spent several decades living in other parts of the world); and vice versa (by staying in one place and becoming fixed in a spatial and social circle).

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In living here in Bibiclat, I reveal these two aspects of myself as stranger and friend all the time. Sometimes I’m immersed in Nana’s family activities, making silly jokes that make her relatives and friends laugh, sharing food and drink with them, doing the occasional mad New Year’s Eve dance, and generally participating in life here in Bibiclat (often as the Fool). At other times, though, I detach myself from it all as I sit down in front of my computer and write down my observations of the people I’ve met, the things we’ve done together, the gossip I’ve heard, and the answers people give to my endless questions (‘Oh, George!’ again). All the time, my communication with those around me is influenced by the self-image I have of myself and by the situations in which I find myself – an image which, like everyone around me, I both knowingly and unwittingly project when I’m in the presence of others, as Erving Goffman so acutely observed. In participating, I’m a friend; in observing, I take on the role of a stranger, or at least of an outsider, as I move – sometimes a little uneasily – between involvement and detachment, between personal feelings and intellectual perception. And that, I guess, is what life in general is all about.

37

Elections The first week of March and the election season has started – at least, unofficially. Politicians running for office aren’t allowed yet to put up campaign posters, run TV commercials or blare out their names through loudspeakers placed on cars and vans driving through neighbourhoods. That starts in mid-April, one month before elections on 15 May, so I’ll miss out on most of the ‘fun’. Nevertheless, even though official electioneering isn’t yet permitted, there’s plenty of unofficial activity going on. About ten days ago, on our way to Aliaga, right on the Bibiclat barangay limits, we came across dozens and dozens of tricycles parked along both sides of the narrow road. People, almost entirely men, were queueing with tickets of some kind to enter a gated enclosure. When I asked Nana what on earth was going on that Sunday morning, she said dismissively, ‘Elections!’ End of story. Earlier this week, we were driving along the Talavera-Cabanatuan road and encountered a string of jeepnies coming in the opposite direction, filled with men all in blue, and with banners on them proclaiming which barangay they belonged to. Over the next few miles we must have passed at least two dozen of these jeepnies, interspersed by vans and trucks whose loading areas had been transformed into rows of plastic chairs filled with blue-shirted supporters. This kind of ferrying of voters in hired transport to public rallies and polling centres is known as hakot. Nana said that the various barangay were all from Quezon City, and that the supporters must be going to some kind of election rally somewhere nearby. They’d been given entry tickets

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and, she added, would be provided with food and drink (known as pakaon) in exchange for listening to several speeches and applauding as appropriate. These are standard practices. What I didn’t witness was the kind of intimidation (panghulga) that is, apparently, also common during election periods. This morning there’s the sound of an ambulance siren wailing further up our road. It seems to get closer, but incredibly slowly for an emergency. What’s delaying its progress? Then I see it moving slowly towards us, followed by more than two dozen other vehicles, all festooned with balloons and proceeding at a fairly stately pace through the village. Most of the vehicles are open trucks. When I ask Nana again what all this is about, she answers that she thinks they’re giving away sand. This, apparently, is a common gift to voters. It happens to be something Nana herself wants for the house. Its backyard is in need of a bit of landfill. She misses out, though. The next day we find that the hitherto cratered, moon-like surface of the road by the school has been filled in with a mass of sand and gravel. Which reminds me of a former life on the island of Aegina in Greece where the imminence of elections was invariably signalled by a marked improvement in the island’s roads. Indeed, it became a standing joke there that if, for some reason, a road was being repaired it meant a general election was about to be called. From an outsider’s point of view, the Philippines – like the UK and USA – has problems of its own about how best to run a ‘democratic’ system of government. It seems that those who want power will do almost anything to achieve it. Then, once they have it in their grasp, they’ll do their utmost to make that power absolute by deciding on who should run for which office, as well as by buying votes, hiring goons and bribing election officials. Ferdinand Marcos was one example of this principle, but other presidents, governors and mayors have done their best to reduce democracy to ‘bossism’. The political system here in the Philippines seems neatly to encapsulate Thucydides’ observation that the strong do whatever they can, while the weak suffer what they must. Bossism isn’t specific to politics or the Philippines, of course. You can find it in the mafia (Sicilian or Russian) and in countries like Thailand and Brazil among others. John Sidel suggests that it emerges when ‘the trappings of formal electoral democracy are superimposed upon a state apparatus at an early stage of capital accumulation’. Dependent on scarce wage labour, and its accompanying economic insecurity, many voters find themselves obliged to accept client-like, coercive and monetary pressures from those in positions of authority

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and power. I guess there’s something magically attractive about power. It’s like eating potato crisps. Once you start, you can’t stop. And yet people vote every time there are elections – and in large numbers, too. The Aquinez sisters reckon that something like 90 per cent of those eligible to vote do so, even though they know that those running for office are, in one way or another, corrupt. There is, though, a certain logic at work here. Blessica explains that the person already in office is a better bet than his or her contender. Why? Because, yes, the mayor in situ is corrupt, but his challenger has to be more corrupt to win an election. As evidence for this counter-intuitive argument, she asks me to look at the Manila constituency of Makati, where she herself, as well as Viola and Nana, are registered to vote. The mayor there has been in office for years and years. He’s made his money and now makes sure that his constituents get something back for their loyalty. So Makati has free medical care – something of which Blessica took advantage when her husband was terminally ill with diabetes. It has created special places in its well-equipped schools for children from the provinces. Both Telay, Tuto’s daughter and Nana herself were able to take advantage of this when they passed the high school exams for outside scholars. None of this would have been possible if the current mayor had lost one of his early elections. Why? Because the challenger would have been too busy wheeling, dealing and increasing his fortune to worry about his constituents’ needs for at least a decade. Better the devil you know, therefore, than one you don’t. This intriguing take on voter strategy doesn’t account for change. Rather, it assumes a continuity of politicians in office ad infinitum. This, of course, doesn’t happen, though not from want of trying. But it shows people’s thinking behind voting for tried and tested candidates who, when they eventually retire or die, have already made public their choice of successor – someone groomed for office, who has as a result had the opportunity to build part at least of the fortune necessary to pay back constituents who support him (or her). Payback? ‘But, of course’, exclaim Blessica, Nana and Teté simultaneously. ‘You give the barangay captain 30,000 pesos. He give you T-Shirts supporting him. After, when he’s elected, he do what you want’. Would-be politicians, then, often disregard the rules underpinning the ideal of democracy. They make false promises, of course; but they also buy votes, rig election results and – if pushed – arrange to have their opponents killed.

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Local elections are, in the words of J.K. Campbell, essentially competitions between those who support one man (or woman) in power because they are his allies, and those who want a change because they aren’t his allies. As a result, a barangay captain’s, or municipal mayor’s, political skill might best be summarised, perhaps, as his ability to grant just a sufficient number of favours to constituents before an election to detach them from the ranks of the opposition when voting comes around. In the political arena, alliance means that a municipal mayor can be a helper who makes things easy for a local inhabitant when it comes to bureaucracy. Not being allies means that he might become a deliberate and successful obstructionist. In effect, therefore, the network of alliances developed by a mayor, barangay captain and other influential villagers becomes a system of patronage with favours and concessions dispensed as appropriate. In this respect, political organisation in the Philippines would seem to be a copy of that found in its former coloniser, Spain, and other Mediterranean societies where ‘clientele politics’ have prevailed. ‘Mutually beneficial transactions’ are what seem to count in a system where power lies with those who control, and are able to allocate, resources of one kind or another among their allies. In a way, the political system here mirrors that of the family in its apparent adoption of the kind of reciprocity I discussed earlier in relation to the sharing of food. Still, unlike family life, in political affairs there’s an expectation of a gift’s return of some kind – like a supporting vote in exchange for a truckload of sand in one’s backyard. The function of elections in Aliaga and Bibiclat, therefore – as it is in other municipalities and barangay – is the production and reproduction of human relationships. Networks of family, friendship and political allegiance constitute each villager’s self, where every material transaction is a momentary episode in a continuous set of social relations. At the same time, by doing what is right by local people, one establishes, then maintains, social status. Generosity becomes a passport to social success. Gifts are the embodiment of society. But also, by engaging in a system of reciprocal exchanges, participants in poblacion and barangay life reinforce a social unity that both includes some and excludes others. Although in theory willing to provide for any one of her family members, neighbours or casual visitors, Nana in fact tends to invite certain people and not others. Some of these in-groups (especially those based on family and friendship) are long-lasting; others, like those involving the painters

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and builders working on Nana’s house, less so. Yet business-related ties are not demarcated from friendship – as the Saturday night drunken parties with Actually, Joy and the other painters attested. When Julius ricked his back at work, we took him to the local hospital to make sure it wasn’t anything serious. And, after taking him home, Nana made sure to visit him before he came back to work, to check that he was all right. Exchanges in political life, however, strike me as more instrumental than those in which Nana engages in her everyday life. Politicians and their supporters may be patrons and clients, but patrons and clients are by no means equals. Exchanges between them may be varied, face-to-face and personal in character, but they arise from and reflect disparities in their relative wealth, status and power. The ability to redistribute wealth and favours, then, involves the right of a (would-be) politician to call on his followers for material assistance (the provision of jeepnies to drive supporters to political rallies around the country) and his (or her) obligation to be generous in return (giving out branded T-shirts and supplying food and drink at rallies), as and when the occasion demands. In this case, not only does redistribution sustain a community (of like-minded political supporters); it also enforces subordination to a central individual authority (the barangay captain, for example, or the Mayor of Aliaga, the township in which Bibiclat is located). At the same time, though, supporters are hardly pawns in a one-way relationship. A politician needs followers, which is why he has to reciprocate their allegiance in some way. This is rather different from the kind of reciprocity that takes place in our everyday lives where family lies at the core of the gift. Rank, then, can affect the forms taken by transactions among villagers. A politician occupies a position of privilege and has, as his responsibility, an obligation to provide for those in his constituency. So we get chiefly demand, on the one hand (turn up at a rally, vote in an election), and solicitation from below, on the other (a truckload of sand for the back yard, get roads repaired before an election, solicit a financial contribution to a local school event). The rationale here is one of assistance and needs, and there is between politician and his supporters a supposition that a gift or favour will be returned. Is this how patron-client relations acquire, or lose, their moral force? As patron, a politician should protect his clients as best he can from both private insecurities (personal enemies, drive-by shootings) and external dangers (outside officials, tax inspectors, police drug busts). He’s also expected to use his power as broker to extract rewards from

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that same outside world (where he himself may well be the client of a greater political figure). By wresting resources from elsewhere, a municipal mayor increases the pool available for redistribution among his supporters who are then suitably impressed and work harder to keep their patron in power. How do they do this? Well, by contributions of various kinds, of course – money, favours, material support. They’ll help campaign for him when he, or his patron, runs for office. But they also act as a patron’s eyes and ears in town and village life. In the end, whether a patron and client regard the relationship between them as worthwhile in large part depends on the ratio of favours and services provided to those received. Just when a return of such favours takes place isn’t fixed. Rather, it’s usually left until a need of some kind (an election) precipitates it, and what is returned bears no necessary equivalence to the initial gift (a vote in exchange for a truckload of sand). Although some kind of equivalence is anticipated by both sides, any material flow between patron and client can be unbalanced in favour of one side or the other for a longish period of time. In the end, though, they tend to balance out. At least, so goes the theory. There’s one difference I’ve noticed between the two kinds of exchanges I’ve been talking about here. When a supporter receives a truckload of sand for her yard, or a teacher a donation for the middle school graduation ball, the receiver thanks the person bestowing the gift. This isn’t so in everyday family life. From time to time, Nana has told me quietly: ‘I don’t say “thank you” all the time, my love. But I feel enormous gratitude to you for your help. So I repay it in all the ways I’m able’. Thanks do not need to be spoken, because in everyday family and community life a gift, of whatever kind, will always be returned: unstintingly, and – unlike clientele politics – without calculation of return. This means, however, that residents in Bibiclat are unable to exit from the generosity and obligations that this system of generalised exchange engenders. Even though they buy and sell goods, they also engage in non-monetary exchanges (like paying for the loan of a tractor during rice transplanting with a proportion of the final harvest). In other words, they have not yet completely embraced the defining feature of the market: a modern sense of freedom. Transactions are never closed, but remain open, as part of an uninterrupted chain of giving and reciprocating. What circulates is part and parcel of the bond between family members, friends and neighbours. It’s a gift of the self.

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But everything I’ve written here about the need for reciprocity is based very much on a Mencian view of the universe: that people are by nature good unless proven otherwise. Is this really how Philippine society works? Are people so selfless, so accommodating to one another’s needs? John Sidel would say not. In a carefully documented book on longentrenched elite political families, their economic pre-eminence and illegal activities influencing the outcome of elections, he argues that a kind of ‘negative reciprocity’ has prevailed in local politics, allowing the emergence and entrenchment of local strongmen. In other words, it isn’t a benevolent paternalism that guides political behaviour so much as ‘bossism’. This bossism, he says, shouldn’t be attributed to the sociocultural legacy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish colonial rule (which my discussion of patron-client relationships suggests), but owes its origins to the way in which the capitalist state developed under American colonial rule during the nineteenth century. For various reasons, state institutions were early on subordinated to a multi-tiered hierarchy of officials elected at municipal, provincial and national levels. The latter have been able to accumulate vast wealth and power by determining fees for the leasing of the public market and other concessions; by disbursing government revenues through construction contracts and public sector employment; and by licensing cockfight arenas, ice plants, sawmills, rice mills, jeepnies, buses and ferries in their bailiwicks. In so doing, they’ve run roughshod over any and all who thought to stand in their way. Violence, not benevolent paternalism, has ruled much of the land. Sidel’s argument is compelling, and grim for those who are fighting for the democratic empowerment of the Philippine people. But one has only to look at the current President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, to see that both bossism and paternalism go hand in hand. As Mayor of Davao City, Duterte was both paternalistic patron and fearsome boss whose orders had to be followed. So, is this ‘bossism’ as such, or a kind of ‘authoritarian clientelism’? Each resorts to charisma, coercion or ideology, depending on immediate political goals. But neither is stable or permanent in character; and neither provides the necessary structural linkage between local community, where the interests of elite family groupings prevail, and central state. So clientelistic politics ends up as a particularistic system of exchange, which is not ideological and which, as a result, provides no political or social programme (which may explain why the country’s

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main parties are virtually indistinguishable from one another). The Philippines boasts an oligarchic democracy dominated by an elite who uses its access to state resources to maintain and expand its economic and political power. This doesn’t bode well for the longterm struggle of the people of Bibiclat to escape their poverty and economic insecurity. Later on in the year, I get a chance to meet and talk to the newly elected Mayor of Aliaga, one David Angelo R. Vargas, known more generally as Gelo (with a soft /G/). When I asked Nana what happened in the elections back in May, Nana told me that Mauro, the Bibiclat barangay captain, was re-elected, but that his ‘patron’ failed to retain the mayorship of Aliaga. That went to Gelo Vargas, the son of a former mayor. Nana’s eyes lit up as she added that he was ‘young and handsome’. She agreed, though, that Mauro’s failure to back the winner for town mayor (alcalde) might work against him when it came to getting things done in Bibiclat, which in itself might well lead to his replacement as captain in the next elections three years down the line. The next day, following a long phone chat with Malou, Nana has more news. ‘Malou’s brother, Josép, has been asked to work as the Mayor’s secretary or personal assistant or something’, she says, changing as is customary the final /f/ in Joseph’s name for a /p/. ‘Malou will ask him to arrange a meeting with Gelo for you’. How Joseph attained such a giddy height, Nana isn’t sure, but says that his grandfather was Mayor of Aliaga and Nueva Ecija Provincial Councillor back in the day. More recently, his brother-in-law was barangay captain and he himself has worked in local government in Papangas. What led to his being called up to act as the new mayor’s secretary, though, is unclear. Sure enough, though, the following morning, at around 9 am, Joseph calls Nana to ask if I’m free there and then. The Mayor has nothing to do until 10 am when he’s due to officiate at a civil wedding. Nana suggests that the afternoon might be better since, like the Mayor himself, I’m still finishing off my breakfast. There follows a series of text messages throughout the day between Joseph and Nana, who is able to give me a blow-by-blow account of where the Mayor is and what he’s doing that day. Finally, around 4.30 pm, she announces that he’s on his way to the house and will be here in half an hour. I hurriedly shave and shower.

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Just after 5 pm, there’s a shout from the street and Nana rushes out to open the gates. A large white Toyota Fortuna backs into our parking space and out gets Joseph and another unassuming, but well-groomed, young man casually dressed in black polo shirt and trousers, and wearing blue canvas shoes. I find myself shaking hands with Gelo. The four of us go inside, while five bodyguards (or ‘goons’ as they’re usually referred to) hang around outside, where they’ve parked their own large white Toyota Hi-Luxe pick-up. After making sure our important visitor is quite happy with just a glass of water, I start to ask him about his political background. Gelo is twenty-nine years old, a ‘millennial’, as he proudly refers to himself several times during the next couple of hours. His father was Mayor of Aliaga when he was younger, so the family has been ‘in service’, as he puts it, since 1992. Gelo himself is married, with one two-year-old son and another child on the way, although he and his wife live largely apart because she’s First Councillor (and Chairman of the Budget and Appropriations Committee) in the district of Mandaluyong, next to Makati in Manila, where his mother-in-law is currently Mayor. ‘My father-in-law was also Mayor of Mandaluyong for nine years before. Have you heard of him? Ben Hur Abalos? Ben Hur wasn’t his real name, of course. That was Benjamin. But here in the Philippines, people often change their names when they’re sickly, or something like that. My father-in-law called himself Ben Hur, like in the film. He was a very good Mayor and received an award from the UN for running one of the best government districts in the world’. It’s clear that I’m in the presence of one of the country’s more important political families – a potentially powerful dynasty has been spawned through the marriage alliance between the Abalos and Vargas families (which itself has enabled Mandaluyong and Aliaga to be officially recognised as ‘sister cities’). Gelo gives away as much when he jokes about how he and his wife have already given their son, David Marshall, a nickname, Max, that will make him readily electable should he decide to go into politics when he grows up. ‘Government to the Max!’ He laughs. ‘Good, right? People will remember a name like that and vote for him’. So how did he get started? Was he groomed to be Mayor from childhood? ‘Not really’, he says. ‘Actually I wanted to be a doctor, and took premed when I was in high school in Manila. But then I got interested in

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what my parents were doing back here in Aliaga. I didn’t see them much. They were so busy. Always going around to different parts of the municipality, and getting phone calls at three in the morning from one of their constituents in desperate need of their help. And my parents always did their best to help and seemed so happy, even though they were exhausted. ‘So I began to get interested in politics because I could see it gave my parents so much satisfaction. They could do simple things that were easy for them to do, but which really helped poor constituents who were suffering. I began to understand that being in politics was a matter of serving. I, too, wanted to serve. ‘I found out that I could try for the position of Youth Representative on the Aliaga Town Council and ran for election. I won and found myself on the Council in 2007 at the age of seventeen. That made me give up studying to be a doctor and start focusing on public administration. I then went on to study law at university in Manila. ‘And now I’m Mayor of Aliaga. Not the youngest Mayor in the Philippines – there’s one who’s only twenty-four years old – but still, pretty young. And that’s good. There are a lot of young people in the Philippines and we need to look to their future. Still, that doesn’t mean we should ignore old people. They have a life experience that can be really useful to young people who don’t yet have that kind of thing. I find my parents really helpful in this regard’. Given that he is now a Municipal Mayor, how does Gelo see his future? Will he move on to become a Provincial Governor, or Senator, or something like that? He parries the question smoothly. ‘As a politician I cannot think in terms of a “career”. That’s because I’m elected by the people. It’s the people who decide if they wish to re-elect me, or elect me to another office. This means that my first duty is to my constituents’. He pauses for a sip from his glass of water before continuing. ‘I think that the most crucial thing in politics in empathy. I have to empathise, sympathise with people, and help them any way I can. The other day, for example, I went to a wake held for one of my constituents. While I was there, I talked to people and learned that the casket the family was using to bury their dead relative cost them 100,000 pesos. One hundred thousand! When the cost of the house they were living in was only about fifty thousand pesos. What was going on here? Why do people who are so poor feel they have to spend so much on buying a casket for a dead relative, when they can’t afford it and so have to borrow money to bury him. This results in the next generation finding itself having to pay off a debt, which will only

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be renewed when one of them dies and needs a casket costing another 100,000 pesos. It’s ridiculous. ‘In fact, I made some enquiries and discovered that the ex-factory price of each casket was only seven thousand pesos. Somebody was making an enormous profit because poor people, however poor they are, feel that the dead should somehow be “rich” when they go to Heaven. It makes no economic sense when, as a result, they themselves will never be able to escape poverty. ‘And Aliaga is extremely poor. I mean, the municipality has a basic income of just eleven million pesos a year, to add to the 172 million we receive as IRA (Internal Revenue Allocation) from central government. Compare this with my mother-in-law’s district of Mandaluyong which has an annual budget of 3.5 billion pesos. No wonder, they can afford to give all children living in the district free shoes, free clothing, free books, free iPads, free everything except their underpants. ‘So what I plan to do is make sure that anyone who dies here in Aliaga can buy a casket for 7,000 pesos, straight from the factory. That way, the people here might be able to raise themselves above their present poverty level. Certainly, they’ll be able to avoid going into debt the way they do now. ‘Not that things are going to be easy. As you know, Nueva Ecija is the “rice bowl” of the Philippines, but farmers are really suffering these days because of the central government’s decision to allow rice imports from places like Thailand and Vietnam. And, of course, imported rice is cheaper than the rice people grow here. Which means that local prices have dropped markedly over the past year, and farmers are really in financial trouble. ‘So, my job as Mayor is to help my constituents, who are among the poorest in the country. My father started an Agro-Industrial Plan when he was Mayor, and set up one or two plants which could give food products “added value” – like turning squash into noodles, for example. I plan to take this sort of thing much further. In fact, since being elected Mayor, I’ve signed an agreement with a Chinese manufacturer of Doc Marten’s shoes to set up a factory here in the barangay of Santa Rosario. We’ve found the land and the factory will be built in the first half of next year. It’ll provide somewhere between three and four thousand jobs. Not bad, eh!’ He is understandably proud of his achievement. But I realise from what he says later on that his in-laws have been of immense help in realising it. ‘I told you about how rich Mandaluyong is. It has a huge source of income from business and, as I said, provides children living there

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with all kinds of things for free. At one point, my mother-in-law told her Chinese shoe supplier that, if it wished to have its contract renewed, it should arrange to provide alternative jobs for displaced farmers. This led to my being put in touch with a Filipino who has been working in Guangzhou for the past 30 years or so, and together we found a manufacturer prepared to set up here in Aliaga. Luckily things worked out really well. Actually, it’s a blessing. And I’m very grateful’. It is at this point that Gelo shows that he is not just some kind of pawn in a political family dynasty, but has his own clear ideas about how he wants Aliaga to develop. ‘My father was one of those closely involved in the planning of the new expressway that’s being built across the fields over there’. He gestures vaguely over his left shoulder, more towards Aliaga itself than to the expressway as such. ‘He was the one who ensured that it would have an exit at Aliaga, and not somewhere else nearby. In other words, Aliaga is going to be the first port of call in Nueva Ecija for anyone coming from Manila. This will mean more traffic – of both cars and people – when the expressway opens in a few years’ time. ‘But I’m not just talking about people from outside the province. Because Aliaga is located on the expressway, all the other eight municipalities in this, the First District, of Nueva Ecija will pass through my town on their way to Cabanatuan and other parts of the province. Aliaga will become a kind of bottleneck, syphoning traffic into the province as a whole. ‘At the same time, because Cabanatuan itself has grown out of all proportion in recent years and is in a total administrative mess, it will be logical to start relocating government institutions to Aliaga. I’ve already conducted a Feasibility Study for the location here of a State College and national agencies like the DOH (Department of Health), CJO, and Department of Statistics. I’m also in the process of building a commercial hub which will house these agencies, as well as a shopping mall. That should be finished by the end of next year. ‘So I guess I could say that the main aim of my administration is centralisation’. Gelo pauses for another sip of water, and spears a slice of apple from the plate Nana has placed before him. ‘Still’, he continues, ‘none of this really solves the problem facing me as Mayor. How are we to generate income, and from where? People here have no buying power. The trouble is the Philippines is basically a service provider to other countries in the world. We send away all our trained doctors and nurses, all our engineers, to work abroad. In the meantime, people back here don’t move forward.

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‘There are two things that prevent them. One is that the State makes it too easy for Filipinos to go abroad and work. They should be working here and contributing to the country as a whole. The other is the “K to 12” system of education where, after kindergarten, children go through six years of elementary school, four years of high school, and two years of college. But they don’t go any further. We need to change this system because it isn’t working, and the last thing we want is to settle for something that doesn’t work. People have to be able and willing to go on to tertiary education – to attend university and get a degree. That is where they learn to analyse and to think for themselves and others. This, in my opinion, is really important for the future of our country’. I ask Gelo how much support he gets from his municipal council. He smiles ruefully. ‘That’s one of my headaches. I’m the Mayor, but I have to get my municipal council’s agreement to make innovations or changes. There are two ex-officio members of the Council, and eight others. That makes ten in all, and I only have the support of three. The others are all clients of the former mayor, whom I beat in the May elections. And they’re stuck in their ways. It doesn’t matter how good a project might be for Aliaga people as a whole, they won’t support it unless it somehow coincides with their own vested interests’. He sighs. ‘So I have to cajole them and overcome their opposition. With barangay captains, though, it’s a different matter. Whether they support me or not politically, they have to do what I say. If they don’t listen or they disobey me, I can suspend them. ‘Most of them, unfortunately, are fairly hopeless at their jobs – or what, in my opinion, their jobs should be. They get elected because they’re popular, not because they’re in any way competent. So I insist on their attending seminars about how to make and administer a budget, put projects out to tender, and so on. Unfortunately, they pay virtually no attention’. We’ve been talking for more than an hour and a half by now, and I sense that Gelo probably needs to be moving on. He has more important things to do than talk to an inquisitive foreigner, although he is suave and polite enough not to show it, and a couple of times during our talk has even offered to arrange an interview with his mother-in-law and wife, if I wish. ‘Government’s a big spider’s web. You need to make friends in order to get things done. I have to go to Manila to get projects approved. There I meet other mayors who offer all kinds of advice. It’s easy to

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make friends over a bottle of alcohol! That’s why politicians don’t live that long. Too much drinking!’ He laughs. Finally, I decide to take the bull by the horns and ask Gelo directly about vote buying. ‘Look! I’d be a hypocrite to say that it happens only with my opponent, but never with me. It does. But in Aliaga it’s nowhere near on the scale you come across in large municipalities. But I’ll say one thing. If you want to get rich, go into business. I wouldn’t recommend becoming a politician’. I’m not sure about this, but I have to admit that I’ve been impressed by the fact that Gelo has proper, realisable plans about how to develop Aliaga from a backwater town into a thriving modern municipality. My fear is that his constituents living in such poor barangay as Bibiclat may not appreciate his efforts the next time an election comes round. Or perhaps they will, if Nana is anything to go by. As Gelo shakes her hand to say goodbye, she says, ‘Goodbye, Mayor. You are so gwapo!’ He’s clearly got women’s votes! A couple of evenings later, Jhon Jhon, Christian and Malou come over for a barbecue dinner (as freelance taxi driver, Kambal is picking someone up from Manila Airport). At some stage in the evening, they get on to politics. Nana suggests that Malou, who is clearly very proud of her grandfather’s achievement in being elected Mayor of Aliaga, ought to run for election as barangay captain and promises to vote for her. When I ask the others what they think of Gelo, Christian quickly says, ‘It’s too early to tell yet’. He looks a bit sceptical when I tell him that Gelo has arranged to build a Doc Martens shoe factory in Santo Rosario, and merely says, ‘Let’s wait and see’. I have the feeling that both he and Jhon Jhon supported the former Mayor Moreno, for whom Nana’s father, Agapito, was campaign manager a few years ago before his death. At any rate, when I ask about vote buying, all three of them quickly rejoin that all candidates do this. Gelo is no better or worse than any other politician. The next morning, Nana revealed how many voters happily manipulate a system designed to manipulate them. ‘Kuya Tuto got his family well organised back in April. He and Mandel went to a gathering of Moreno’s followers and got one thousand pesos each. Then Avelina and their other son, Marlon, went to one of Gelo’s rallies and got their own hand-outs. I don’t know who they voted for, if anyone, in the end’. she laughed, ‘but they made a lot of money!’

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She then continued. ‘My friend Lyn really profited from the election. She and her mother went to both Moreno’s and Gelo’s rallies, collected 4,000 pesos, and bought a washing machine for 3,600. We should probably have elections more often!’

38

Beliefs I’ve already talked about how different members of Nana’s family belong to different sects, and how they or their partners will often change affiliation when they get married. This raises a question: how constant, and how deeply felt, are their religious beliefs? What strikes me, as I drive around the countryside, is how many different churches there are here, together with their variations of what is loosely called Christianity (and, remember, Blessica distinguishes between Christians and Catholics): the Catholic Church, of course, and Aglipayan, but Evangelicals, the Evangelical Christian Outreach Association, Iglesia ni Cristo (Church of Christ), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, Crusaders of the Divine Church of Christ Inc., Bible Baptists, Fundamental Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses (of whom one, from Jamaica of all places, tried to convert me in a shopping mall only yesterday), Faith Tabernacle Church (also called Living Rock Ministries), Seventh-Day Adventists – the list goes on and on, and includes not just Lutherans and Buddhists, but followers of Islam (the second largest group in the Philippines) and various tribal beliefs (animism, shamanism, and so on). The church that stands out the most is Iglesia ni Cristo (INC), or Church of Christ – primarily because it has created a ‘brand’ through a standardised architectural style, with churches usually painted grey and white, and sporting readily recognisable, slightly Gaudilike twin spires above their western entrance. INC is the third largest church in the Philippines, after the Catholic Church and followers of Islam. An independent religious organisation, it was established

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in the Philippines in 1914 by one Felix Manalo, who claimed that Iglesia ni Cristo was – surprise, surprise – the ‘one true church’ originally founded by Jesus himself back in the day. Manalo himself claimed, again, that the establishment of his church was an act of divine providence and that it fulfilled a biblical prophesy about the establishment of Jesus’ church in the Far East. He’s claimed by his Church to have been the last messenger of God. Manalo appointed himself ‘Executive Minister’ of INC until his death in 1963, whereupon his son, Eraño, took over and grew the church further, both within the Philippines and abroad. It now has ‘missions’ in 150 or so countries around the world. Official government and sect figures of the number of adherents differ, but they certainly make INC bigger than all other Christian denominations except Catholicism. When Eraño died, his place as Executive Minister was taken by his son, Eduardo. In short, like a number of ‘new religions’ in Japan, Iglesia ni Cristo is a family business. And, like all family businesses, it has expanded its sphere of activities – in this case, into radio, television, event management, higher education and humanitarian activities (disaster relief, family planning, health care, and so on). INC has been cited multiple times in the Guinness Book of World Records for the sheer scale of numbers of people it has mustered for its various activities. Teté’s youngest child, Sherwin, who’s just turned seventeen, has been a follower of INC for a couple of years now, although his mother doesn’t seem too happy about it. When I first asked why Sherwin had forsaken the Catholic Church, Nana said it was because his girlfriend was also a member and he was essentially following her, rather than Manalo’s ‘one true God’. Between us, we’ve occasionally pulled his leg about Iglesia, but yesterday I took the bull by the horns during a long drive to Ordoneta, where he and his mother were to collect their first passports, in order to be able to apply for Canadian visas to visit his sister in Nova Scotia. My question was simple enough. What makes INC different from the Catholic Church, to which his mother Teté belongs? Sherwin quickly recited its founder’s name and the founding date of his church – with a speed that smacked of ‘indoctrination’ – but he was unable to tell me what made INC different as such. So I explained that, as I understood it, the main difference was that Manalo didn’t believe in the Holy Trinity, but in God the Father as the ‘one true god’. In short, his church espoused a version of Unitarianism. Neither Jesus nor the Holy Ghost were considered deities as such. Since this was all basic info I’d gleaned from the Internet, I suggested he do the same. It might

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be a bit more edifying than the endless hours of computer games to which he seems addicted. But enough of all that. Sherwin’s beliefs are, as I told him, his beliefs. All I asked of him was to remember that he was involved in a family business and to think of how families often controlled their members. I also suggested that he not accept anything through blind faith, but remember to ask why something is as it is. In other words, I suggested he adopt an ‘Oh, George!’ approach to life. ‘Yes, Un-kél’, he said, and that was that. My concern over Iglesia ni Cristo has nothing to do with its somewhat dubious reinterpretations of the Bible and the meaning of salvation. Rather, it derives from the fact that it clearly disregards that part of the Philippine constitution enshrining the separation of church and state. Whenever elections come round, INC tells its adherents whom they should support. This moral obligation becomes an absolute command because of their belief in the infallibility of their church’s leaders. As a result, their electoral support can be overwhelming, as voters deliver over 98 per cent of total votes in every constituency in which they dominate. This is a variation on the kind of patron-client relations I discussed in the previous section. Not surprisingly, grateful politicians have now instituted an ‘Iglesia ni Cristo Day’ as a national holiday on 27 July (the day of the Church’s foundation back in 1914). President Duterte, who received the support of INC in the 2016 elections, appointed the current executive minister, Eduardo Manalo as special envoy for overseas Filipino concerns for a year from the end of January 2017. The relation between religion and clientele politics is found in the ways in which the State has privileged, and continues to privilege, the believer in Catholicism. If you happen to belong to one of the ‘upland’ tribes – Lumads, Moros and other indigenous minorities who do not in the main follow Catholicism, but Islam – then you’re not a ‘proper’ Filipino. Catholicism and Philippine identity belong together. Catholicism, in particular, has developed a range of benevolent patron saints – like San Juan Bautista and San Isidoro – who act as intermediaries between an Almighty God and favour-seeking dependent humans. It thus establishes an ideological world view that closely parallels a conception of Philippine society based on political and economic patron-client relations. Religious and political patronage reinforce each other. Each provides a model of, and a model for, the other. Is the political patron, then, a kind of ‘saint’? Believers can, of course, develop their own ‘client’ power through piety. An important way they do this is by getting involved in Church

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affairs, such as fundraising, promotion of events or assistance with traffic and crowd control during the Mud Festival, for example. But there are other forms of volunteer work they can engage in, as well as regular attendance at Mass: by having a son or daughter as an altar boy or girl, or – better still – as a priest or nun. The cultural and social capital accrued in these ways by a fervent believer may well translate into economic and political advantage in barangay life. So, just as a person’s financial assets contribute to their economic standing and class status, their spiritual status – that is, their public standing in relation to the Church – strongly influences their social, cultural and political place in broader Philippine society. Belief is a social habit which events then confirm. In a way, the Church is like the family in that the founding principle of both is loyalty. Indeed, it’s difficult to separate the two forms of organisation because the family relies on the Church for recognition and affirmation (through baptism, communion, marriage and funeral) and, in turn, the Church expects members of every family to participate in confession, Mass and other rituals (like parading the Black Nazarene through the streets of Manila or local township). A system of quid pro quo underpins the continued existence of both Church and family. The two differ in one fundamental way, however. While inhabitants of Bibiclat and surrounding barangay can choose which Church to express their allegiance to, they cannot choose their relatives. And yet, given the fact that well over 90 per cent of the population of the Philippines believes in a Christian God in one form or another, this freedom of choice is, perhaps, somewhat illusory. Belief is a strange – a strange what exactly? An idea? A social practice? A way of thinking? An emotional reflex? It seems as if we’re able to believe anything, if we put our minds to it. In other words, we can, like Teté, accept that the Virgin Mary’s immaculate conception warrants no explanation other than that it was a ‘miracle’; or that a giant and a dwarf lived in the ylang-ylang tree in the back yard of Agapito’s house, and the smaller of the two wasn’t too happy about the arrangement; or that a man’s ability to have children depends on his being circumcised; or that a particular presidential candidate must be ‘good’, if our local priest tells us to vote for him (or her). Belief upholds the social lives of people who depend on habit and sentiment. It prevents an ‘Oh George!’ approach to life. I tend to think that it’s our capacity to believe – in the sense of our capacity to discard rational thought, or to adopt a different form of rationality – that distinguishes humanity from all other living beings.

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OK, dogs seem to believe that, if they do as they’re told and fawn over their masters (or mistresses), they’ll be properly fed and rewarded with pats on the back and soothing rhetorical questions like ‘Aren’t you a good dog?’. But they do not, so far as I have observed, sit down and ask themselves questions like, ‘What makes this human being so stupid, as to love me more than their spouse and children?’. Dogs make do with the fact that their lives are a ‘miracle’. I say that belief – like the pre-Hispanic belief in the Philippines in a whole pantheon of gods and spirits, as well as in human guardians of houses, streams, trees, forests and mountains, and a more modern belief in the existence of UFOs, ghosts, the apocalypse, the efficacy of lucky charms, and so on – involves discarding rational thought. This is true, but only at the time we initially grasp hold of a belief. Thereafter, as with creative ideas in advertising campaigns, or bringing in the death of Saint Valentine to justify love and the sacred rite of marriage, we proceed to post-rationalise, to explain why we believe what we believe. In this way, unlike dogs, we transform belief into rational thought – a transformation which is little short of magical. Most of the time, then, when we say ‘I think so and so’, we’re actually saying ‘I believe so and so’. We disguise our beliefs as rationality. In this era of social media brought on by humanity’s fourth great cultural revolution, digitisation (the other three being the invention of the printing press [literacy], the camera [visual images], and the radio [the transmission of sound]), we need more than ever to be aware of our irrationalities. Of which, of course, this entry may be just one more. Which itself begs the question: when do we know the difference between thinking and belief?

39

A Shotgun Wedding I come back to Bibiclat for the annual feria and the ‘mud festival’. Nana comes to meet me in Manila, together with Kambal, who is our ‘chauffeur’ for the four-hour journey back to Bibiclat. He drives at a terrifying pace on the busy EDSA road, weaving in and out of traffic, zooming illegally along the lane reserved for buses, ignoring various speed limits all the way to Tarlac, where we finally turn off the motorway, and I heave an – as it turns out, slightly premature – sigh of relief. On the country roads he hardly drives any slower and, as always, we have to keep our eyes peeled for motor tricycles driving without lights, and for dogs sleeping in the road. Still, we get home more or less in one piece. I suspect that the plastic rosary hung from the rear-view mirror of the car, which Kambal touched before crossing himself when we started our journey, may have saved us from several fates worse than death. Nobody opens the gates to the house when we arrive somewhere near midnight at the end of, what for me, has been a twenty-seven-hour journey from my other home on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon. One of Blessica’s twins, Karen, is inside watching TV, and either doesn’t hear us or is too engrossed in the programme to bother to move. Another niece, fifteen-year-old Gloria (Salomé’s youngest daughter, who has Down syndrome) is in the shower. Their mothers, together with Viola, are out watching the local beauty pageant in the barangay ‘plaza’. Once inside, Nana somehow tunes into it on her iPad and together we watch a slightly blurry video of a dozen contestants, all in long floor-length yellow ball gowns, parading on a stage set up for the fiesta’s activities.

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I comment on their height. All but one of the girls stands several inches taller than the male announcer. ‘How come I’ve never seen such tall girls in the barangay?’, I ask. ‘Because there aren’t any’, Nana replies quickly. ‘They’re all wearing four-inch stilettos’. Apparently, the girls have already paraded on stage twice before: first in casual clothes, and then in swimsuits. Now, just before midnight, each is called up, Miss Universe-style, to answer questions like: ‘If you’re given a chance to change Dana, the Wonder Woman, what kind of changes would you make?’ and ‘If you were to meet the President, what sort of things would you like to ask him, and why?’ and ‘Why did you join this beauty competition?’ The answers are by no means as fluent as those provided by aspirants for the Miss Universe title, but then Binibini Bibiclat (Miss Beauty Bibiclat) isn’t quite the whole world yet, although, for many local people, it may seem to be. Several girls stutter through their replies; two others start off quite fluently and then stop – for as long as half a minute – as they search for words. Those who manage to whip off their answers get loud applause – not for the content of what they have to say so much as for their agility with language and ability to overcome an inherent Filipino shyness. Next morning, Blessica says that the pageant – arranged by Nana’s lady-boy friend, Rodél – was all quite boring. Still, they must have found enough of interest – relatives, old school friends and other acquaintances – to keep them at the plaza until three in the morning when they finally came home and woke Nana because none of them had a key to get back into the house. By then, of course, I was sleeping the sleep of the jet-lagged dead, vaguely conscious of dogs barking outside and, later with the dawn, the inevitable Sunday morning call to five o’clock prayers by the San Juan de Bautista church loudspeakers. This was preceded and followed, as always, by the cocks crowing and motor tricycles zooming past the house. Thank God for business class earplugs! When I eventually rise from the dead in mid-morning, I am met by Blessica who calls out loudly and slowly, as if to ensure that I can understand her: ‘Goo-od mor-ning! We-ell-come home! How are you-u? I’m fine, thank you’ – followed, of course, by a fit of laughter, as she gives me a high five. ‘I think I’m alive’, I respond, ‘It was a long sleep’, before adding, ‘Now I’m born again!’

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This elicited the intended whoop of laughter and a further high five from Blessica. I step outside, into what local people refer to in English as the ‘dirty kitchen’ (no more than an outside kitchen where most families cook their meals), and find three other sisters – Viola, Teté and Salomé – cutting vegetables and pork for what’s obviously going to be a massive meal, or maybe several meals, today and tomorrow, when John the Baptist’s feast day is celebrated. The barangay roads are bedecked with gold and silver streamers. The festival mood is everywhere. A passer-by drops in to show off his Ilocos tribal wear; another sells ice creams; a third bangs on two drums and blows somewhat monotonously into a mouth organ tied to his lips (he has no hands free to play it properly). Only a small donation persuades the last to go away. Nana has told me not to ask who’s coming to the house over the next couple of days – to eat, to drink, to pass the time, to sleep. She doesn’t really know herself. ‘It’s fiesta’, she says simply – an explanation guaranteed in Filipino eyes to explain, and forgive, everything. Outside, the chopping goes on uninterruptedly, for the most part in the shade of the garage port roof. More relatives of one sort or another arrive – Tuto, Avelina, and nephews and nieces of all shapes and sizes, most of whom sit inside glued to the screens of their mobile phones. One or two, though, obviously not proud owners of such technological wizardry, just sit and engage in desultory conversation. Telay takes me down the garden – grown wild in my absence – and shows me where her father has cut and hung up to dry the banana leaves that Nana, her parents, and Malou are going to don tomorrow when they make their petitions to the Saint and give thanks for the blessings they’ve already received. In spite of all the carnival, this is the serious part of the feria. The sun comes out; the heat is blistering. Heavy rain is forecast for the late afternoon. Before that, however, Tuto’s younger brother, Darius, appears with his wife and two daughters, Queenie and Corazon. As I bless the young ones, Nana says, ‘Corazon is getting married. His parents are here. She’s pregnant’. ‘How old are you?’ I ask. ‘Nineteen’, the girl replies. Undiplomatically, I respond, ‘Too young’. The whole room is suddenly full. Everyone has come in from outside and sat down on the sofas, chairs and up the open stairs. The air conditioning is switched on and the discussion begins. The boyfriend’s mother, who is from a village quite far away, gives a longish speech; Dar responds; Nana intervenes; followed by Teté. I’m not sure what’s

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going on, but at least some of the discussion revolves around money. Tuto fans himself with his cap. Two of the nieces, Gloria and Karen, go out to watch a parade. Telay drags me outside, too. I find most of the other kids there, and take photographs of gaily decorated farmers’ long-handled tractors as they drive along the barrio street. Some of those on board each vehicle throw candies at me, which keeps all the nephews and nieces happy. They discard the wrappings on the road in front of the house, so I make them pick them up again. ‘Sorry, Un-kél’, each one says in turn, bending down to pick up the offending wrapper. Back inside again and the conversation has picked up. Having been taking it in turns to express their opinions, now all the adult members of the family are talking at once. When I ask Avelina what’s going on, she just smiles and says ‘Marriage’. Yes, but when? How? Where to live? What about work? Money? She laughs, but doesn’t reply. As usual, I’m left in the dark until all is done. Telay comes in to take me outside again. ‘Parade’, she says. Dutifully, I follow her and watch more gaily decorated floats with high school Figure 39.1. Telay being coy. © Brian Moeran.

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kids dressed up as couples, followed by a brass band. This seems to be standard fare for any festive occasion. I’ve seen it all before. Ah! The jaded foreigner! By the time I’m back inside, the discussion style has gone back to turn-taking speeches. Nana, even though the youngest of the father’s siblings, is having her say. The future bride and groom-to-be sit at opposite ends of the same sofa, separated by Viola. Neither of them seems to be paying much attention to what’s going on as they play with their mobile phones. At present, this is clearly a matter for the two families, not them. It seems like the women are taking over. The man I’ve hitherto assumed to be the boyfriend’s father goes outside with the woman sitting beside him, leaving his wife to argue his family’s end. Except, Nana tells me, he’s not the mother’s, but the boyfriend’s oldest sister’s, husband. The mother and father have been separated for almost as long as the boyfriend has been alive – a bad sign for Corazon? – and he was brought up by his maternal grandfather. Blessica, Viola and Nana are leading the discussion on Dar’s side. Salomé, always the quiet one, says nothing (although, as I’ve learned, this doesn’t mean she doesn’t have an opinion). Diplomatically, they try to help the parents from each side come to an agreement as to how best to proceed. Dar wants the couple to be married in church – that’s the proper thing to do – but the mother can’t afford it. She suggests a civil wedding, which doesn’t go down too well with the sisters. Nana, however, decides to put her oar in and, from just outside the main circle, addresses her older brother at some length in Tagalog, in a speech which is interspersed with words like ‘be practical’, ‘importante’, ‘weakness’, and ‘ten-day process’. Let them have a civil wedding and, later perhaps, when money’s forthcoming, have a ceremony in church. She moves to perch on the low table opposite Dar to press her point. Teté, too, moves to sit beside the boy’s mother on the chair vacated by the brother-in-law. For his part, Tuto has put his cap back on and reclaimed his position by Dar at the bottom of the stairs. Brothers ranged against sisters? Maybe, but amicably so, at least. Dar is fixated on a church wedding because, as Nana later says, it looks much better than a civil wedding for a pregnant bride’s family. Dar will gain credit and be seen to have done ‘the right thing’. And God, of course, will have blessed the union, complete with its third unborn, but fully alive, member. Parents have to ‘look good’ when things go amiss with their children. There’s little worse in barangay estimation than a daughter living at home as a single mother.

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Nana appreciates this family quandary, but points out that a church wedding is irrevocable. The Catholic Church doesn’t permit divorce. With a civil wedding, however, separation and re-marriage are easier. Given how young the couple are – she’s nineteen, he twenty-one – the chances of their staying together are slim. Dar, by insisting on a church wedding, is virtually condemning his daughter to a life of sin. Hence Nana’s call to her brother to ‘be practical’. The only practical thing being discussed right now, though, is when and where the marriage should take place. September is mentioned. But other practicalities – like how the couple is going to make a living, and where the two young people will live – are ignored, or at least left aside for now. They will, God willing, take care of themselves. The sky has been getting darker and darker. It looks like serious rain.

40

Feria A week before I arrived back in mid-June, Telay posted a photo on Instagram of one of the barrio streets in Bibiclat festooned with streamers. ‘Yippp, Fiesta is cominggg!’ she tagged, and added a happy heart emoji. The feria is Bibiclat’s big event of the year. I’ve mentioned it before, in the context of the miracle believed to have been performed by the patron saint of the barrio, San Juan Bautista, or Saint John the Baptist, whose divine rain intervention saved fourteen local inhabitants from execution at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Pacific War. This local belief in a miracle was later officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church, as was local people’s ritual of covering themselves with mud and banana leaves to pray for good health, protection from danger, a good harvest and various things on their everyday wish list. Known colloquially as taong putik, or ‘mud people’, this ritual now attracts visitors from elsewhere who flock into the barangay for a morning to bathe in mud and cover themselves with banana leaves, before congregating at the village church of San Juan Bautista, where the Bishop of Cabanatuan officiates at a 6 am service held outside in the church’s forecourt. One of the reasons Nana hasn’t joined me in England after finishing her job in Hong Kong (apart from our failure to procure her even a six-month tourist visa, as I’ll soon relate) was because she wanted to take part again in the Mud Festival, to thank the Saint for past blessings, and to entreat him for something in the future. What that

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something might be is, of course, like wishes we make when breaking a wishbone, her own private issue. She has warned me that the house is likely to be crawling with people, and in due course it was; at one point in the early afternoon, there were almost two dozen relatives and neighbours camped inside and outside the house, eating, talking and laughing shrilly enough to silence both street dogs and the pigs in the neighbour’s yard. Like most ritualised social gatherings – a wedding, funeral, birthday party or Valentine’s Day – the Mud Festival combines serious purpose with a carnival-like atmosphere. Although you can read a lot of the basics on Internet websites, I’m a great believer in experiencing things myself, so I’ve come back to Bibiclat to find out what actually goes on during the Mud Festival. This means somehow overcoming jetlag and getting enough sleep to get me through what promises to be a long day – something I totally fail to do from the start. I wake up from a three-hour sleep at one in the morning and then toss and turn till 4 am when Avelina phones from downstairs to wake us up. We get dressed – Nana in black sleeveless top and shorts – and go downstairs, where Tuto has arrived with Malou. He’s already taken the banana leaf coverings he made before the weekend from where he had hung them to dry at the end of the garden, and thrown them across the roof of his motor. The three women climb into the sidecar, while Tuto gets onto the bike behind his youngest son, Mandel, and they prepare to drive off. ‘Hey! Wait a minute!’ I call. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To the tumana – the fields’, says Nana. ‘Yes. But where in the tumana? Remember, I’m trying to learn about this festival’. A bit reluctantly, Nana says something to Tuto who gets off the bike and offers me his place. He somehow manages to crawl into the already jam-packed sidecar and settles himself among the three women. I duck my head under the low roof over the bike itself and hang onto any bit of metal structure I can lay my hands on as Mandel turns the heavily-laden motor round and heads down the street towards the school and the crossroads beyond. ‘Which way?’ he asks. ‘Straight on’, comes Tuto’s muffled instruction from the nether regions of the sidecar below us. We drive slowly along the concrete road where JR once pointed out a ‘pillow tree’ and soon come to a halt by an irrigated field. It’s still

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pitch black. Compared with northern Europe, daylight in the summer months comes late in the tropics. As I ease myself from under the motor roof and off the saddle, the other four clamber out of the sidecar, take the banana leaf costumes off its roof, and cross a dyke into the field. Suddenly quiet, they use their hands to scoop up the muddy water and cover their faces, arms and legs. Then they swish their banana plant costumes back and forth in it until they are really muddy, before helping each other put them on, using some fronds to tie them at the waist. In the meantime, somebody in the house opposite has switched on his motorbike headlamp to help Nana and the others see what they’re doing. I discover there’s a foreigner beside me taking photos of what’s going on. He warns me not to get too close or I’ll get covered in mud. By the sound of his accent, he’s French – the first European I’ve ever encountered in this Luzon backwater village. The Mud Festival is clearly an international attraction. Once they’re ready, the three women and my brother-in-law step up out of the field and walk along the road in eerie silence. They stop at each house they pass and wait, again in silence, to be given alms (five or ten pesos) or a candle. At the first three, they’re unsuccessful. The inhabitants have already dished out their supply of candles or money to other, earlier supplicants. But at the end of the road, the man who runs a small truck depot is ready with a whole box of candles and hands one to each supplicant. These are again received in silence. Later, when I ask Nana why this was, she says: ‘I don’t know. It’s true. I never spoke when asking for or receiving alms. Somehow, when I covered myself with mud, I lost my ability to speak. I was no longer human. Kuya Tuto kept chattering, the way he always does. But none of the rest of us did’. Certainly, the banana leaf covered figures walking silently – and, in very large part, barefoot – through the streets, pausing phantom-like in front of houses or kiosks before moving on, remind me immediately of ghosts – or of the disembodied image we tend to have of ghosts – their mudded faces, arms and torsos invisible under the leaves. I leave Nana and the others to go their way – they don’t want a foreigner traipsing along after them when they’re clearly taking things very seriously. So, at the main village crossroads, I exchange a few words with a traffic policeman (‘Welcome to the Philippines!’ he says), before turning towards the church where a dozen or more stalls have been set up selling candles and paraphernalia of various kinds – balloons, brightly spray-painted yellow, green and orange

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birds, flip-flops, plastic toys. I pass by Kambal and Malou’s house, but he’s out, her father says. He doesn’t know where. Come by later. In the large open space in front of St John the Baptist’s church, a group of children is re-enacting the story of the Mud Festival. Ghostlike figures of supplicants make their way among other members of the audience towards a long steel structure where they light their candles and pray. At this point, they remove the top part of their costumes so that their heads and faces are visible. Presumably this will help the saint recognise each of them when he deals with their individual petitions, but it also reveals in physical form the classical reconciliation between defilement and holiness found in religions around the world. Prayer makes the ‘mud people’ less ghost-like, more human, in spite of the dark that is only just beginning to give way to dawn. As with the condemned villagers awaiting execution back in 1944, prayer restores life. Once they’ve lit their candles, supplicants move towards the statue of St John the Baptist set up nearby. There again they pray, as the children’s play acts out its final scene of the Japanese firing squad on the nearby stage. It’s after 5 am and beginning to get light. Overhead a drone hovers filming the scenes in the church forecourt. More and more supplicants are pouring through the entrance to the church,

Figure 40.1. Mud Festival supplicants praying. © Brian Moeran.

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leaving behind them on the ground wayward fronds that have somehow detached themselves from their costumes. The cries of the candle sellers are imbued with renewed energy. A new performance begins, heralded by loud music. This time it’s the turn of older children and grown-ups to re-enact the story of St John the Baptist’s intervention in Bibiclat’s history. But why is it that a ritual celebrating the power of water over fire – of Catholic baptism over Japanese belief in Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess – seems to reverse this battle of the elements? Fire, for both Catholics and the Japanese, is the symbol of light. In this it can be said to overcome water, although the two very often go hand in hand. Every baptism in church, for instance, is overseen by the lighting of candles. Ultimately, though – and here those properly versed in Christian traditions may disagree – fire appears to prevail. With the promise of eternal damnation in the burning fires of Hell, it’s the ultimate threat to non-believers. I suspect this is too simplistic a view. According to Catholic Church doctrine, just as, biologically, water allows the human foetus to gestate and be born, so does it permit spiritual re-birth through the intervention of the Holy Spirit in baptism. Water is thus associated with divine life. Fire, on the other hand, symbolises the transforming energy of the Holy Spirit’s actions (and not just eternal damnation). St John the Baptist himself proclaimed that Christ would baptise his followers ‘with the Holy Spirit and with fire’. Since the Mud Festival commemorates an event involving the Japanese, I should add here that Japanese mythology is no less replete with the opposing symbols of fire and water. According to early eighth-century chronicles, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the world began with two primordial deities of the Shintō religion – Izanagi (‘he who invites’) and Izanami (‘she who invites’) – who together created the islands of Japan by stirring the ocean with a jewel-encrusted spear, from which drops of salt – or mud (taong putik beware!) – fell into the ocean and became islands. They then began the usual process of begetting children. This wasn’t without mishap. First, Izanami spoke at the wrong time during her marriage ceremony with Izanagi, had a miscarriage, and gave birth to an ugly, boneless creature who was cast out to sea and has since become Ebisu, the god of fishermen (and note how Jesus Christ called himself the fisher of men). Thereafter, she gave birth to more than 800 gods who now form the Shintō pantheon, although she was very badly burned by one, Kagutsuchi, the God of Fire, and died after childbirth.

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Izanami then went to Yomi, or the Underworld, to which her grieving husband Izanagi followed and where, like Orpheus and Eurydice in Greek mythology, he petitioned for his wife’s return to the land of the living. Like Orpheus, Izanagi was granted his petition. Like Orpheus, he then failed to obey the command not to look back at his wife before leaving Yomi, and so ended up returning to the outside world alone. As he purified himself with water from his pollution with death, he gave birth to three deities – Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, when he washed his left eye; Tsukuyomi, the Moon Goddess, when washing his right eye; and Susano’o, the Storm God, when washing his nose. It is from Amaterasu that the Japanese Imperial Family claims to trace direct descent (in the process appearing to favour left over right, east over west) – which is why Bibiclat’s inhabitants regard St John the Baptist’s intervention with rain as a ‘conquering of fire by water’. Still, Imperial Japan’s direct link with the Sun Goddess, at the expense of both the Moon and Storm deities, may have been a mistake in this particular context. Amaterasu never got on with her younger brother, Susano’o, who was an obstreperous kami, to say the least, and who ended up by being banished to Izumo, on the Japan Sea, for having broken down his sister’s rice fields: in other words, for his destruction of the country’s irrigation systems. Amaterasu herself went into a huff, hid in a cave and plunged the earth into darkness. She refused to emerge until lured out by another goddess’ promiscuous dance. In this mythological story, fire and water are pitted against each other, and fire wins, so that the balance between fire and water present in Christian dogma is broken in that of Shintōism (although water is, of course, essential to purification). But, to return to events that took place in Bibiclat in November 1944, Japanese Imperialism’s sin might be interpreted as a failure to recognise the mutual force of fire and water, by focusing on the Imperial Family and worship of the Sun Goddess, rather than by taking a broader view of Shintō beliefs. The story of Amaterasu isn’t that far removed from what’s going on in this village in Luzon one early morning in late June. The sacred is in both cases expressed through rituals of separation. Izanagi went to the underworld in search of his deceased wife; Amaterasu locked herself up in a cave; the ‘mud people’ cover themselves with mud and banana leaves and cease to be human while they walk the streets of Bibiclat. Their demarcation is reinforced by beliefs in the danger of crossing forbidden boundaries. Its consequences can be dangerous. Not that all this bothers those acting out the origin myth of the Mud Festival in front of the barangay Catholic church. Now that it’s properly daylight, news reporters and photographers (three of whom

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Figure 40.2. Mud Festival church service. © Brian Moeran.

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are Caucasians) patrol the spectators, looking for interviews and photo opportunities. Not surprisingly, as a tall foreigner I attract their attention and end up answering a set of vapid questions in front of a TV camera. Finally, with the large forecourt packed with supplicants and ‘normal’ people, preparations are made for the most important part of the festival. A dozen choirboys in surplices set up a makeshift altar in front of the church. A cross is brought out, as well as a lectern to which a microphone is attached. Various priestly dignitaries, including the Bishop of Cabanatuan himself, wait in the wings, looking serious, although I do elicit a cheerful smile from them when I ask to take their photo. Eventually, the Bishop prods one of his minions with his staff and they move up to the top of the Church steps where a dozen supplicants in their banana leaf costumes also stand. The service begins, with song that is fervently sung by the congregation, before prayers take over. At this point, I decide to slip away. I can’t follow the Tagalog service and, not being a Catholic, don’t know what to say or when to do what. So I weave my way out of the forecourt onto the road and go back to Kambal and Malou’s house next door to the church. As I start to enter, I hear my name called from across the road. It is Kambal himself. After the customary high five, he gets me a large glass of water and a couple of plastic chairs on which we sit watching passers-by. Some supplicants are already leaving, even though the service is in full swing. Presumably they’ve no need of official blessing once they’ve been through the ritual of covering themselves with mud and banana plants and praying in front of the candles they’ve lit in the church forecourt. A young woman with writing pad approaches Kambal and asks him something. He shrugs, then points to me. ‘You want interview?’ he asks. ‘OK’, I say, since I realise he’s trying to get out of the woman’s request by passing the buck. So she sits down on Kambal’s chair and asks me a couple of questions about being a tourist at the Mud Festival in Bibiclat. When she realises that I’m not exactly a tourist, she gets out her mobile phone and asks if she can record what I say. I agree, say enough to satisfy – or, more probably, confuse – her and she thanks me politely, before asking me to sign a consent form allowing her to use the interview data in her MA thesis. Even here, there’s no escaping university bureaucracy. Kambal nudges me as she walks away. ‘Get her telephone number?’ he asks, then laughs, gives me a high five, and jerks his head towards the other side of the road.

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In front of the house where Joy, one of our painters lives, two men are initiating a cockfight. Or, at least, one of them is using his cock to tease another and get it to fly higher and higher into the air until it almost strangles itself on a clothes line. There’s much amusement, but also concern. Feathers are stroked, birds preened with their owners’ spittle. Kambal asks if I want something to eat. ‘You must have breakfast’, he says, as we cross the road back to his house and I sit down at a table in the covered driveway. He goes into the house and comes back out with what he calls leche flan – a kind of crème brûlée, without the brûlée, that I remember eating in Valencia fifty-five years ago and which, here, is a typical feria food. As I tuck in hungrily, he says, ‘Eat! Eat everything I have. You want fruit salad? I bring you salad’. And off he goes into the house again before re-emerging with a dish of milky-white fruit salad and spaghetti-like strands which I quickly realise are coconut flesh and its milk. And, having refreshed myself in this way, we move back to our chairs facing the street.

Figure 40.3. Malou, Nana and Avelina as ‘mud people’. © Brian Moeran.

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‘Church finish 7 o’clock’, Kambal says. ‘Then parade. Nana, Malou, they all come out and go round the streets with music’. Sure enough, the service ends – not exactly when predicted – and a band strikes up as a dozen banana leaf clad figures carry the statue of St John the Baptist at the head of a long procession of supplicants. Several of them stop when they see Kambal and either bless, or are blessed by, him depending on their age and social position. Hands are quickly raised to foreheads, and brief greetings ensue before the supplicant rushes back to his place in the procession. Once Malou, Avelina, Tuto and Nana have passed by – their muddied faces now green from the creepers used to weave the banana leaves together – I take my leave of Kambal and head back home with Telay, who has suddenly materialised out of nowhere. We decide to take the first, rather than second, turning to the left to get back to the street on which Nana’s house is located, and find ourselves face to face again with the statue of St John the Baptist, and the procession following it, including Nana and the others. They’ve gone round the shortest block possible. The streets by now are choc-a-bloc full of cars and motor as people try to get away – by no means an easy task. Walking proves to be much quicker and, finally, I can make myself some coffee. It is still only 7.25 am. Although the main part of my day may be done, there’s more to come. I’m determined to see the carabao race – or karrera – which I’ve discovered takes place some time today, although where or when nobody has been quite sure. Earlier, Kambal phoned around for me and eventually told me that it was taking place out in ‘the tumana’ the other side of the barangay Plaza, but wasn’t quite sure where in the fields exactly. He added that the race would start at nine o’clock. I’ve an hour or so, therefore, to find out how to get to wherever it is I have to go. The sun is out, though, and the temperature is already in the low thirties; and high humidity makes it feel closer to forty, so I don’t anticipate with any pleasure standing out in shade-less fields all day, or having to set off on the circular route that I regularly took on my winter evening walks. Can I get transportation somehow? I ask Telay, and she calls up her brothers – neither of whom seems willing or able to help. So she gets in touch with her father who’s just got home and is washing off all the mud. He says he’ll take me once he’s done. We wait. And we wait. And we wait. Nine o’clock comes and goes. Eventually, at 9.20, Tuto arrives on his motor, with Avelina clinging to him side-saddle on the back. Both are spic-and-span, with mud removed and Avelina’s hair smelling of shampoo and conditioner.

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‘Karrera ten o’clock’, he says, when I point at my watch. ‘And twelve o’clock. And two o’clock. Final five o’clock’. Finally, here is somebody who knows what’s going on. There isn’t one race, of course, but several: elimination rounds, semi-finals and the final itself. The idea of standing out in the blazing sunshine for the next seven hours, though, hardly appeals, and Tuto conveniently points to the sky and says ‘hot’. Maybe a briefer visit to the ‘race course’ would be more appropriate. Amidst much laughter, I somehow clamber inside the low-slung side car, and Telay settles in beside me. Avelina gets back on the bike behind her husband and off we go. It takes less than five minutes to reach our destination, which is already packed with other motorcycles parked along the dirt track that leads eventually to the hanging bridge (the site of Tuto’s circumcision many years ago). I quickly realise that any doubts I’d had about how to find my way to ‘the tumana’ had been misplaced. Thanks to the noise and bustle of people and motorbikes, a blind man could have found his way here easily. Under the only row of tall trees on the other side of an irrigation sluice, a group of men in brightly coloured T-shirts are sitting with their carabao – which have been especially washed, groomed and oiled for the occasion. The black hides of the water buffalo do indeed match the skin of the Black Nazarene; they look sleek in a way that emphasises their weight and power. Further up the track, people are gathered under the only other piece of shade around – a small acacia tree – where one woman has set up a stand selling buko coconut water. Two or three men are hawking coconut fruit salad and ice cream, while out in the field preparations for the races are under way. The karrera turns out to be a form of harness racing where a jockey sits on a two-wheeled cart, or ‘sulky’, harnessed to the water buffalo, and goads his animal forward with a long whip. Preparations for each race – apart from getting a water buffalo properly attached to its steel-barred sulky and then guided down to the starting point at the far end of this tract of field – seem primarily to be concerned with betting. One man with a microphone calls out each race and the numbers of the carabao due to run; others in the crowd at the finishing line start calling for bets, hands raised in the air, fingers signalling the odds. Punters and buffalo owners place their bets, and payment is made at the end of each race. As with the cock fight, it’s the betting, rather than the contest itself, which dominates. The track is a straight length of field ploughed into three sets of furrows, separated by lines of untilled grass and weeds, along which

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the water buffalo hurtle, or career, at immense speeds over a 200-metre stretch towards the dirt road where onlookers are all assembled. No wonder the competition is referred to as a karrera (good old Spanish again). When goaded out of their customary slow pace, carabao move at a frightening speed, and jockeys have a hard time maintaining their balance on their wildly rocking sulkies. In the village of Pui O on the south side of Lantau Island in Hong Kong, where I used to live, I’ve seen a water buffalo during the rutting season overtake a local bus. Woe betide anyone who got in its way. As we soon discover here. The finishing line is fifty to sixty metres short of the dirt road on which a lot of onlookers, uninterested in betting, are assembled. Tuto has wisely led us past the finishing line to view the competing beasts from the side of the track. As each race gets under way – and it often takes time for the ‘stewards’ to clear punters from the finishing line – and the carabao show their paces, it quickly

Figure 40.4. A carabao at full speed. © Brian Moeran.

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becomes apparent that anyone standing in direct line at the head of the race track is in danger of being trampled to death as ‘jockeys’ wrestle to bring their animals to a halt. One or two brave, or foolhardy, young men run out from among the bystanders and try to grab the harness tethering sulky to buffalo, but the latter often rears uncontrollably upwards and sideways, making it difficult to bring it to a stop. More rampant animals charge straight on up the bank onto the road where onlookers hurriedly scatter in fear of their lives. Of course, this is all part of the fun of the feria. The elimination races continue, followed by two semi-finals and then, at five o’clock in the afternoon, the grand final. The buffalo which by that time has become the bookies’ and punters’ favourite wins, its proud owner (not a Bibiclat man) pocketing something like 50,000 pesos in the final bet – five times more than Tuto’s vaunted cock will ever make. Not that this money will remain locked in its owner’s pocket or bank account. The good fortune of an individual brought about through gambling cannot be kept to oneself, but must be redistributed. Is this surprising? Not really. For all people’s friendliness and pride in democratic government, Philippine society is, as we’ve already seen, premised on class distinctions based on wealth. There are the clearly ‘haves’ and, equally clearly, the ‘have-nots’. It is the moral duty of the haves to aid the have-nots around them in some way. At the World Slasher Cup, Mike told me a little about the political elite who rule the world of cockfighting in the Philippines. With their money, they’re able to feed their birds special diets and vitamin supplements, and so breed cocks that are stronger, and so more likely to win contests. Almost assured of success, these cock owners bet large sums of money at each parada before a fight. They then distribute some of their winnings amongst their loyal followers who, in turn, redistribute smaller sums to their loyal followers lower down the line. In this way, the elite retain both status (they give away money) and power (they occupy government positions or run business empires), which together enable them to continue breeding cocks and spreading around the resulting largesse that maintains their positions. The same goes on at a more local level with regional cockfights. And also with the carabao karrera. No way can the winner keep 50,000 pesos (if that really was the sum won today) for himself. A brother-in-law needs some money to pay off a loan: better to be in debt to another relative, than to a bank or someone you don’t know. A sister is in the process of rebuilding her home: it’s too small for her family, though, and an extra room would really come in handy. A nephew wants to go to college in Manila: but how can his parents afford it?

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So gambling becomes a redistributive sphere of exchange, which allows patron-client ties to be cemented and the system as a whole to continue unquestioned (unless the patron’s largesse is deemed to be insufficient). It allows family ties, too, to be drawn together and the family as system to be celebrated, even though in many ways it is these ties which prevent individuals from breaking free and making their way up in society. Of course, there are exceptions: an uncle does reach a position of power (in the police force, for example, as Felix’s murder indicated); against all odds, a love marriage can bring money unexpectedly to a poor family. But, as the adage says, such exceptions merely prove the rule. Filipino society isn’t a fair society. Fairness is a concept confined to an ideal world. In the early evening, Telay and Sherwin take me for an evening stroll round the barangay to the so-called ‘plaza’. Normally, this houses little more than a covered basketball court, but during feria time it’s been transformed into a funfair, with roller-coaster roundabout and all sorts of games of chance, as well as a stage on which a dozen local girls paraded during Saturday night’s beauty pageant. At this time of the day, when most families are seated outside in their yards, eating, drinking, talking, laughing and serenading others on loud karaoke machines, only a dozen or so teenage boys and girls are gathered round the single gaming table, where a ‘croupier’ rolls large wooden dice, and they bet on which coloured side is going to face upwards. Sherwin wins his first 20 peso bet; and the next. In his excitement, he places all his winnings, plus his initial bet, down on white. Red comes up. He laughs a sad laugh and we walk away. Back in the house, all the left-over food is served, with plenty of rice. As always, Gloria, Salome’s youngest daughter who has Down syndrome, insists on saying grace. As always, she arrives late at the table, when many of us have already started eating. As always, we put down our spoons and forks to pray. As always, who she is blessing remains a mystery to all but her mother and aunts. Apparently, I’m in there somewhere as ‘Tito Nayan’ (Uncle Brian). By the time dinner is finished, I’m dead and head off for bed and what I hope will be a long, restful sleep. Outside, the sky is filled with flashes of sheet lightning that etch the horizon of acacia trees on the far side of the rice fields across the road from the house. Then come thunder and heavy raindrops, the size of small marbles, splattering against the bedroom window and battering the corrugated metal carport roof. St John the Baptist is clearly still around. Paradoxically, perhaps, the noise of the rain sends me to sleep. Goodbye feria.

Epilogue I’ve done my best here to give a flavour of what it’s like to come and live in a village located in the middle of the rice basin of Luzon – in what sometimes seems like the middle of nowhere. As someone who isn’t an expert on the Philippines, I’m sure I haven’t adequately explained the different aspects of Filipino society and culture I’ve encountered to the satisfaction of my colleagues in anthropology who are experts. But, as every pop star and politician knows, you can’t please everyone, not even some of the time. So let me just say here that I’ve seen my task in writing this book as one that is the classic aim of my discipline: to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. To achieve this task successfully, like any anthropologist, I’ve become a kind of magician, bringing to light some aspects of a foreign society and culture, and hiding (or ignoring) others. In general, as anthropologists well know from hundreds of years of study, magic works and becomes powerful because it doesn’t just skilfully conceal, but skilfully reveals its skilful concealment. Anyone who’s been to magic shows as a child, or who’s followed Donald Trump’s endless tweets and ‘fake news’ over the past few years, will be acutely aware of this. But it isn’t just the anthropologist who performs magical tricks in his (or her) writing about culture. Culture itself is a magician, in the sense that it allows the foreign interloper to peer in and see some aspects of its workings, but not others. What a culture readily makes visible usually conceals under-layers of meaning that often take years, if not decades, to make themselves apparent, while what it doesn’t seem to reveal at first glance is often hiding in plain sight. Philippine culture is no exception to this general rule. As I’ve noted during the course of this book, traditional forms of cooking, clothing and architecture are all marked by a certain ‘translucency’. They both reveal and conceal tastes, bodily form and interior and exterior views of outside and inside worlds. So, too, with the family and interpersonal

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relations, which appear overtly as being about love and respect, but which conceal an underside of jealousy and manipulation. Philippine culture, like all cultures around the world, wrestles with the outsider over which of its aspects it will reveal and which it will conceal. One of the issues that has emerged in this account of Bibiclat is the extreme stratification of Philippine society, where – as in many other countries – the rich are immeasurably rich and the poor depressingly poor. Wealth is accompanied by notable differences in education, and the ability of the upper classes to manipulate elite social networks to their further financial advantage. In the meantime, the system works against the poor being able to find a way to escape their predicament. Their best hope, it seems, is for them to go and work abroad and, in the process, sacrifice themselves on the altar of family, Church and the Philippine State. The Philippines, of course, isn’t the only society to suffer from such extremes of wealth and poverty. In some ways, the UK – where the wealth of just six individuals is greater than that of the lowest one fifth of the population as a whole – isn’t that much better. What is different, however, is that the position of the people of Bibiclat in the internal stratification of Philippine society is matched externally by the place of the Philippines in the pecking order of nations in the global economy. I have, as I’ve said, spent a lot of time living in Japan and studying ‘things Japanese’ over the past fifty years. Japan scholars have often talked about the ‘status gradation of industry’ when describing the country’s post-war economic development. They’ve pointed out how the very largest companies in each sector of the economy early on subcontracted the manufacture of parts for automobiles, ships, television sets, audio equipment, refrigerators, cameras, air conditioners, karaoke machines, and so on, to various smaller companies that tended to locate themselves within easy logistical reach of their parent corporations (Toyota, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Sony, National Panasonic, Canon, and so forth). The Japanese themselves like to think of this status gradation of industry as a sumō wrestling tournament and rank the companies in each industry accordingly. So Toyota and Nissan, for example, are ranked yokozuna grand champions in the automobile industry, with Honda occupying the second-ranking ōzeki position, and Suzuki, Matsuda and Daihatsu one notch down at komusubi. Ranking like this is applied to all kinds of criteria deemed to be of economic importance – from annual turnover and profits to the number of women in senior management positions and the educational background of CEOs

Epilogue • 265

(with universities themselves being ranked as yokozuna, ōzeki, and so on). Later, when Japanese labour and parts became too expensive, Japanese corporations outsourced the manufacture of their products to other countries in east and southeast Asia, where labour was much cheaper. The strength of the Japanese economy led to the emergence of the so-called ‘Asian Tigers’ (Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore), which in turn led to the development of economies in other parts of southeast Asia and, of course, in mainland China. In other words, the status gradation of industry in Japan has gradually been transformed into a status gradation of nations in east and southeast Asia. Nowadays, the two yokozuna wrestlers in the world ranking of nations are undoubtedly China and the USA. Germany and Japan rank as ōzeki, and India, a rising star, the UK, France and Italy as komusubi. After that come all the other lower maegashira top tier nations – starting with Brazil and Canada, moving down through countries like South Korea, Australia, Turkey, and Taiwan, and ending up with Hong Kong and Ireland. Nations excluded from this elite competition, but still wrestling among themselves at a lower level, include Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam, Peru, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Venezuela and the Philippines. These form the second tier barkada, or peer group, in the world’s assembly of nations. Although I knew all of this intellectually, I’d never experienced it at a personal, visceral level. Throughout much of my adult life, I’ve been blessed by my status as an Anglo-Irish white male. People all over east and southeast Asia have treated me with extreme, often undeserved, kindness and consideration during the three decades or so that I’ve lived, worked and conducted research in Hong Kong and Japan. But then Nana applied for a visa to visit me in England. Given that she’d never been anywhere abroad other than Hong Kong, we agreed that it would be better if she first visited the UK as a tourist before deciding if she wanted to live there on a longerterm Spouse visa. So we got onto the gov.uk website, read the rules and regulations (which made us feel quite intimidated), and made an initial application a couple of months after I arrived in Bibiclat. I wrote a supporting letter showing that, as her husband, I had the necessary financial wherewithal to provide for her during her stay, when she’d be living in my house in Devon. Together we explained how Nana had been working in Hong Kong, but was now living in her new home in Bibiclat. We also provided a copy of the return air ticket between Manila and Bristol that I’d bought in advance. Silly me!

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A few weeks later, Nana received a letter from the Entry Clearance Officer (ECO) in Manila rejecting her application, on the grounds that she’d provided no evidence to show that she would in fact return to the Philippines after spending six months in England. She had no job in Bibiclat and needed, therefore, to provide further evidence of her financial wherewithal, job prospects, and family and social ties more generally. When I asked my local MP for help, we were advised by the Home Office in London that we should ‘fully address why Doctor Moeran and Ms Nicolas have made the decision to reside in different countries’. We were also reminded that ‘the onus is on the applicant to provide sufficient information to satisfy the ECO that she fulfils the UK immigration rules’, and that ‘offers of support from a sponsor’ (i.e. myself as husband) ‘do not outweigh the responsibility of the applicant to satisfy the ECO as to their own intentions’. Clearly, Nana was wrestling above her rank. A ‘third world’ citizen wasn’t going to get accepted as a legitimate contestant by a ‘first world’ bureaucracy without being dumped unceremoniously out of the ring in their initial engagement. The English side of me was totally ashamed, and we thought about moving to Ireland (the Brexit débâcle has been pushing me in that direction anyway). To her immense credit, like the best sumō wrestlers, Nana didn’t get depressed or give up. Within a few weeks she was already planning how best to resubmit her application, this time with the help of a Filipina friend in Hong Kong whose own Visitor visa application to go and see her boyfriend in the UK had been approved. Nana explained in considerable detail why she didn’t have a job, and provided details of two commercial ventures on which she was preparing to embark in the following year. She wrote at length about her family and other social ties that would make it incomprehensible for her not to leave the UK at the end of her permitted stay. She provided a photo of the house that she’d spent so much time and money on building, together with a legalised agreement signed by Viola saying that Nana owned half the land in her compound. She also submitted a photo of herself with her favourite Xpander! In both her application and my accompanying letter, we explained very carefully that, as a practising anthropologist, I was conducting ongoing fieldwork research in the Philippines. This not only necessitated my spending several months in a year carrying out research in Nana’s home village of Bibiclat, it also explained why she’d been applying for a Standard Visitor, rather than Spouse, visa to the UK. I wasn’t officially a permanent resident in England, even though I owned outright a house there and paid council tax and what I owed

Epilogue • 267

the Inland Revenue. The Spouse visa was only given for permanent residence. Again, her application was rejected. In addition to claiming that Nana still hadn’t provided sufficient evidence to show that she would in fact return to the Philippines at the end of her visit to the UK, the ECO in Manila gratuitously added: ‘I am not satisfied that your personal and financial circumstances are as stated by you’. In other words, s/he accused Nana of lying. It was at this point that my blood boiled and I decided to take on the Home Office. I wasn’t going to allow some anonymous bureaucrat in the UK Embassy in Manila lord it over one poor Filipina visa applicant. And so I engaged in an extended correspondence with the Home Office in the UK. Somehow I maintained my cool and used thirtyfive years of academic experience to weigh my words carefully and present an irrefutable argument. Apart from demanding an apology for accusing Nana (and by implication myself) of lying in her application, I pointed out that a Standard Visitor visa was the only kind of visa she was permitted by the Home Office itself to apply for. By rejecting her application, the ECO in Manila had contravened – inadvertently, I diplomatically added – Article 16 of the International Charter of Human Rights, which states that a man and wife should be allowed to live together and form a family without government interference or hindrance. I don’t intend to go into a blow-by-blow account of the exchanges that took place over the following four months. I have to say, though, that those employed by the Home Office to answer my letters about a procedural error (I wasn’t allowed to complain about the application’s rejection in itself) get full marks for their engagement in delay tactics and bureaucratic obfuscation. Not only did one official after another spout Home Office regulations about how a visa application should generally be processed, thereby conveniently ignoring the particularities of Nana’s case, but one after another, they focused on the minutiae of lesser details provided and ignored important points until bludgeoned into a corner from which they could no longer reasonably escape. I never managed to get an apology for the ECO’s accusation that Nana lied in her application. The best one Home Office official, a certain Joanna Pye, could write in the last letter I received before being told to shut up was: ‘I am sorry to [sic] if you were upset with it being doubted that your wife was a genuine visitor and would leave the UK after the visa expired. These are standard lines that are used

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in refusal notices’. Maybe it’s time for the Home Office to review its ‘standard lines’? As for the contravention of Human Rights, neither Ms Pye nor anyone else in the Home Office addressed the point, even though it was the basis for all other arguments presented. Instead, I was told by the UKVI Complaints Allocation Hub that ‘your wife’s application will not be reviewed again’. End of story. End? Little did our Joanna Pye know! I was prepared to argue the case in court if push came to shove, but first I decided to approach a features editor I knew in a regional newspaper, the Western Morning News, to ask if he might be interested in running a story about the saga of Nana’s visa application. The Guardian hadn’t bothered to reply to my enquiries, probably because Nana was from somewhere called the Philippines, and wasn’t a seemingly important US academic at Oxford University who was having problems with getting visas for her family to join her in England until The Guardian weighed in. The editor kindly agreed and a week or two later ran an article, together with photo of us both, in the local rag. He asked the Home Office for comment, but all he got three days later was a standard response that every application was treated on its individual merits. Two days after that, Nana forwarded me an email she’d suddenly received from the ECO in Manila. Under ‘exceptional circumstances’, it had been decided to grant her a Standard Visitor visa to the UK. More power to the Western Morning News’s elbow? Or to an intervention by my local MP? Or to the irrefutable brilliance of my arguments with the Home Office? Or to somebody somewhere in that opaque institution waking up to reality? Who knows! But at least Nana can now visit me in my home country. When, though, with coronavirus travel restrictions, remains to be seen. Maybe, she’ll even write her own reflections on what will doubtless strike her as the strange practices of everyday life in England, and the weird and wonderful people she meets there. After all, if there’s one thing the Brits need right now, it’s self reflection – a lot of it. What’s familiar to them strikes foreigners, and those of us who’ve lived abroad for long periods of time, as exceedingly strange. And what’s strange to them can be seen to be quite familiar, as this book hopefully shows.

References

Prologue Geertz, Clifford. 1972. ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Moeran, Brian. 2009. ‘From Participant Observation to Observant Participation’, in S. Ybema, D. Yanow, H. Wels and F.H. Kamsteeg (eds), Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexity of Everyday Life. London and Los Angeles: Sage. Wulff, Helena (ed.). 2016. The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.

2. People Arensberg, Conrad M. 1988 (1937). The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.

3. The Barangay Jocano, F. Landa. 1969. Growing Up in a Philippine Barrio. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

5. Kinship Terms and Names Jackson, Michael. 2005. ‘What’s in a Name?’, in his Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

7. Family Jocano, F. Landa. 1969. Growing Up in a Philippine Barrio. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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9. Chaos and Laughter Bergson, Henri. 2009 (1900). Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. The Project Gutenberg EBook, www.gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h. htm. Douglas, Mary. 1975. Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Smith, Wanda J., Vernard Harrington, K. and C. Neck. 2000. ‘Resolving Conflict with Humour in a Diversity Context’, Journal of Managerial Psychology 15(6): 606–25. Vaetch, Thomas. 1998. ‘A Theory of Humor’, Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 11(2): 161–215.

12. Mobile Phones and Social Media Charles-Smith, Lauren, et al. 2016. ‘Social Media Analytics for Post-Disaster Disease Detection in the Philippines’, Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 8(1). Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller. 2011. ‘Mobile Phone Parenting: Reconfiguring Relationships between Filipina Migrant Mothers and LeftBehind Children’, New Media & Society 13(3): 457–70. Portus, Lourdes M. 2016. ‘Mobile Phones, Philippines’, in Kathleen Nadeau and Jeremy Murray (eds), Pop Culture in Asia and Oceania. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Tandoc, Edson C. Jr. and Bruno Takahashi. 2017. ‘Log in If You Survived: Collective Coping on Social Media in the Aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines’, New Media & Society 19(11): 1778–93.

13. Irrigation Beardsley, Richard K. et al. 1959. Village Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Price, David. 1994. ‘Wittfogel’s Neglected Hydraulic/Hydroagricultural Distinction’, Journal of Anthropological Research 50(2): 187–204. Shimpo, Mitsuru. 1976. Three Decades in Shinwa: Economic Development and Social Change in a Japanese Farming Community. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Wittfogel, Karl. 1955. ‘Developmental Aspects of Hydraulic Societies’, in Julian Seward (ed.), Irrigation Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Washington, DC: Pan-American Union. Zialcita, Fernando Nakpil. 2005. Authentic Though Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

14. Rice and Classification Aguilar, Filomeno V. Jr. 2008. ‘Rice in the Filipino Diet and Culture’, Research Paper Series 2008-03. Manila: Philippine Institute of Development Studies.

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Bohannan, Paul. 1965. ‘On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange’, in Michael Banton (ed.), The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology. London: Tavistock Publications. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary. 1975. ‘Deciphering a Meal’, in her Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Godbout, Jacques T. 1998. The World of the Gift. In collaboration with Alain Callé. Translated by Donald Winkler. Montreal and Kingston, CA: McGillQueen’s University Press, p. 32. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Goody, Jack. 1982. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. ‘The Culinary Triangle’. Translated by Peter Brooks. Partisan Review 33: 586–96. Needham, Rodney (ed.). 1973. Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

15. Going for a Walk Hamilton-Paterson, James. 1987. Playing with Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island. London: Faber & Faber.

18. Spirits Jocano, F. Landa. 1969. Growing Up in a Philippine Barrio. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Mcfarland, H. Neil. 1967. The Rush Hour of the Gods. London: Macmillan. Moeran, Brian. 2010 (1985). Okubo Diary: Portrait of a Japanese Valley. London and New York: Routledge.

19. Birthday Parties Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hamilton-Paterson, James. 1987. Playing with Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island. London: Faber & Faber. Leach, Edmund. 1958. ‘Magical Hair’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 88(2): 147–64. Synnott, Anthony. 1987. ‘Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair’, The British Journal of Sociology 38(3): 381–413.

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22. Circumcision Bloch, Maurice. 1992. Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

23. Blackness Douglas, Mary. 1975. Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marinay, Fr. Isidro T. 2016. ‘Black Nazarene Procession: Reading the Statement of the Voiceless’, De La Salle University NCCRE 1 (1): 96–102. Zialcita, Fernando N. 1986. ‘Popular Interpretations of the Passion of Christ’, Philippine Sociological Review 34: 56–62. Zialcita, Fernando N. 2013. ‘The Burnt Christ: the Filipinization of a Mexican Icon’, CIEHL: 67–75.

27. OFWs Acacio, K. 2008. ‘Managing Labor Migration: Philippine State Policy and International Migration Flows, 1969–2000’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 17: 103–32. Bautista, Julius. 2015. ‘Export-Quality Martyrs: Roman Catholicism and Transnational Labour in the Philippines’, Cultural Anthropology 30(3): 424–47. Cabanes, Jason V.A. and Kristel A.F. Acedera. 2012. ‘Of Mobile Phones and Mothers-Fathers: Calls, Text Messages, and Conjugal Power Relations in Mother-Away Filipino Families’, New Media & Society 14(6): 916–30. Constable, N. 1999. ‘At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns’, Cultural Anthropology 14(2): 203–28. Lamvik, G. 2002. The Filipino Seafarer: A Life Between Sacrifice and Shopping. Unpublished Dr. Art. Trondheim, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. McKay, D. 2007. ‘“Sending Dollars Shows Feeling”: Emotions and Economies in Filipino Migration’, Mobilities 2(2): 175–94. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller. 2011. ‘Mobile Phone Parenting: Reconfiguring Relationships between Filipina Migrant Mothers and LeftBehind Children’, New Media & Society 13(3): 457–70.

28. Of Cocks and Men Bataille, Georges. 1986. ‘Sacrifice’, in ‘Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzche, Un-Knowing’. Translated by Annette Michelson. October 36: 61–74. Bloch, Maurice. 1992. Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Dundes, Alan. 1994. ‘Gallus as Phallus: a Psychoanalytic Cross-Cultural Consideration of the Cockfight as Fowl Play’, in his edited The Cockfight: A Casebook. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Guggenheim, Scott. 1994. ‘Cock or Bull: Cockfighting, Asocial Structure, and Political Commentary in the Philippines’, in Alan Dundes (ed.), The Cockfight: A Casebook. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss. 1981 (1964). Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions. Midway Reprint. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lawler, Andrew. 2015. Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization. London: Duckworth Overlook. Reinert, Hugo. 2016. ‘Sacrifice’, Environmental Humanities 7(1).

32. Valentine’s Day Forbes, Bruce David. 2015. ‘Valentine’s Day’, Chapter 2 in America’s Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, pp. 45–78.

36. Security Guards Arensberg, Conrad. 1968 (1937). The Irish Countryman. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Moeran, Brian. 2010 (1985). Okubo Diary: Portrait of a Japanese Valley. London and New York: Routledge. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1967. Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. London: Secker & Warburg.

37. Election Bohannan, Paul. 1965. ‘On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange’, in Michael Banton (ed.), The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology. London: Tavistock Publications. Campbell, J.K. 1964. Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Firth, Raymond. 1971. ‘Moral Standards and Social Organization’, in his Elements of Social Organization. London: Tavistock Publications. Gellner, Ernest and John Waterbury (eds). 1977. Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies. London: Duckworth. Godbout, Jacques T. 1998. The World of the Gift. In collaboration with Alain Callé. Translated by Donald Winkler. Montreal and Kingston, CA: McGillQueen’s University Press.

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Quimpo, Nathan Gilbert. 2005. ‘Review: Oligarchic Patrimonialism, Bossism, Electoral Clientelism, and Contested Democracy in the Philippines’, Comparative Politics 37(2): 229–50. Sidel, John T. 1999. Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

38. Beliefs Boissevain, Jeremy. 1977. ‘When the Saints Go Marching out: Reflections on the Decline of Patronage in Malta’, in Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury (eds), Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies. London: Duckworth, pp. 81–96.

Index

A Aglipay, G. Cruz y Labayan, 184 Aglipayan church, 183–4, 238 agriculture community, 52, 133 crop, 78–9 expenses, 80 supplies, 147 wet rice, 82, 85, 159 (see also irrigation) Aliaga, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 42, 50, 51, 53, 55, 66, 93, 142, 157, 211, 223, 226. See also mayor alcohol, 44, 86, 87, 110, 111, 112, 116, 236 Amaterasu, 253–4 American, 31, 49, 50, 88, 95, 105, 149, 160, 164, 168, 169, 170, 172, 184, 187, 188, 197, 217 colonialism, 138, 184, 194, 229 football, 159, 167 holidays, 196 songs, 115, 128 ancestor, 107, 212 anthropologist, 3, 6, 8, 50, 59, 63, 67, 81, 89, 92, 132, 171, 181, 206, 211, 263, 266 anthropology, xii, xiii, 1, 3, 4, 5, 46, 81, 128, 131, 164, 176, 263 palm tree, 10 Arabic, 38, 147, 148, 155 army, 50, 128, 202 American, 88 Imperial Japanese, 19, 133, 138, 249 recruit, 13, 128, 194

B ballot, 55, 139 bamboo, 24, 69, 78, 95, 104, 134 banana, 7, 18, 68, 78, 95, 118, 133, 189, 204 leaves, 87, 133, 134, 140, 245, 249, 250, 251, 254, 256, 258 baptism, 141, 241, 253 Baptist, 238 Church, 132 John the, 18, 19, 132, 133, 134, 140, 141, 172, 189, 240, 244, 245, 249, 252–3, 254, 258, 262 barangay, 9, 10, 13, 15, 18–26, 39, 47, 50, 51, 53, 56, 76, 80, 83, 131, 133, 135, 140, 157, 187, 203, 207, 211, 214, 216, 223, 233, 241, 243, 244, 245, 247, 249, 254, 258, 262 captain, 15, 20, 76, 83, 134, 203, 208, 226, 227, 230, 235, 236 health centre, 126 origin, 20 sports centre, 187 barkada, 128, 163, 178, 265 Bataille, Georges, 179, 180 Bautista, San Juan. See Baptist, John the beauty, 64, 167, 215 pageant, 166, 243–4, 262 (see also Miss Universe) belief, 4, 5, 48, 105, 106, 107, 109, 125, 126, 128, 138, 140, 141, 177, 183, 185, 188, 238–42, 249, 253, 254. See also religion, superstition

276 • Index

betting, 159, 162–3, 167, 170–3, 174, 175, 177, 179, 220, 259, 260 odds, 169–70 system, 162–3, 167, 174 betwixt and between, xiv, 87 Bibiclat, xiii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9–10, 17, 18–26, 27, 28, 34, 35, 37, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 56–7, 61, 65, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97, 99, 105, 112, 116, 125, 129–130, 133–4, 136–141, 145, 146, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 176, 177, 179, 181, 184, 186, 189, 198, 201, 203, 209, 222, 223, 226, 227, 228, 230, 236, 241, 243, 244, 249–54, 256, 261, 264, 265, 266 cemetery, x, 211–216 and Manila, 9, 15, 16–7, 54–5, 74, 220 binibini. See beauty birthday, 102, 109, 112 party, 116–122, 139, 250 black, 131–5, 271 Nazarene, 131, 132–3, 134, 176, 181, 182, 241 blessing, 7, 40, 65, 97, 98, 144, 234, 245, 249, 256, 262 Bloch, Maurice, 126 boodle fight, 87–8 boss, 96, 147 ism, 224, 229 bribe, 166, 208. See also favour, vote bureaucracy, 81–83, 88, 226, 256, 266, 267 C Cabanatuan, 13, 22, 24, 29, 53, 54, 56, 68, 83, 142, 148, 193, 195, 196, 211, 217, 221, 223, 234 the bishop of, 249, 256 Campbell, J. K., 226 car, 22, 49, 53, 61, 72, 83, 102–3, 116, 131, 142, 148, 151, 156, 157, 165– 7, 214, 216, 217, 223, 234, 243, 258 purchase, 27–32 See also Mitsubishi, Xpander

carabao, 21, 54, 79, 80, 82, 95, 108, 134, 135, 211, 259 race, 133, 258–261 carnival, 248, 250. See also feria, mud festival Catholicism, 39, 52, 82, 105, 141, 176, 182, 197, 239, 240 Catholic, 11, 30, 39, 48, 108, 123, 181, 182–3, 184, 196, 213, 238, 253, 256 Church, 4, 7, 11, 50, 52, 82, 103, 133, 134, 136, 140, 181, 190, 239, 248, 249, 253, 254 chaos, 58–9, 118, 134, 138, 220 charm, 177, 242 children, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 60, 61, 65, 67, 70, 73, 74, 75, 81, 94, 103, 105, 106, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121, 125, 127, 128, 129, 140, 142, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153 154, 155, 176, 178, 179, 180, 183, 186, 188, 207, 212, 213, 215, 220, 225, 233, 241, 242, 247, 252, 253 mestizo, 137 school, 53, 235 Chinese, 13, 16, 17, 66, 67, 85, 107, 138, 152–3, 189, 213, 220, 233–4 chocolate, 193–5, 197 cake, 109, 120, 204 industry, 199 Christian, 39, 42, 134, 197, 239, 241, 253, 254 Born Again, 14, 50, 182, 183 name, 33 sect, 183 Christianity, 176, 181, 183, 238 circumcision, 2, 3, 125–130, 157, 159, 176, 178, 179, 189, 197, 259. See also foreskin civilisation hydraulic, 82, 83 classification, 5, 50, 84–92, 189 cleanliness, 128, 134, 143, 148, 178, 189–90, 212

Index • 277

clothing, 11, 41, 49, 53, 77, 78, 90, 91, 147, 189, 193, 212, 214, 233, 244, 263 cock, 4, 7, 13, 61, 66, 87, 156, 158, 160, 161–2, 167–8, 171–2, 173, 174, 177, 179–180, 244, 261 fight, 2–3, 4, 87, 91, 156–180, 182, 197, 198, 206, 257, 259 pit, 157, 160, 170, 173, 177, 229 coconut, 7, 66, 72, 78, 143, 257, 259 comfort room, 127 women, 137 commensality, 91–2, 207, 222, 226. See also meal communication, 13, 60, 71–2, 74, 75–7, 100, 106, 147, 148, 158, 180, 222 excommuncation, 184 non-verbal, 144 communion, 134, 177, 178, 180, 241 community, 36, 59, 68, 76, 91, 126, 180, 221, 227, 228, 229 Filipino-American, 6 gated, 220 pottery, 1, 52 rural, 3, 180, 209 solidarity, 91 consumerism, 139 cooking, 56, 60, 66, 67, 84, 86–8, 103, 110, 143, 147, 189, 212, 215, 263. See also commensality, meal culinary hierarchy, 88 triangle, 86, 87 cultivation, 81, 92 shifting, 85 slash and burn, 85 swidden, 85 cultural background, 221 capital, 241 event, 165 guideline, 220 meaning, 33, 59 norm, 63 performance, 160, 174, 175 product, 138, 147

revolution, 242 trope, 197 culture, 5, 34, 87, 101, 121, 137, 138, 211, 263–4 material, 160 D dead, the, 33, 37, 67, 77, 85, 104, 106, 182, 206, 212–4, 233, 244 death, 26, 90, 91, 93, 103, 104, 128, 132, 140, 162, 167, 171, 177, 178, `80, 189, 198, 199, 203, 206–8, 214, 216, 236, 239, 242, 243, 254, 261. See also funeral debt, 154, 174, 208, 232, 233, 261 democracy, 83, 137, 146, 176, 218, 224, 225, 229 dirt, 134, 143, 189, 190 doctor, 126, 127, 148, 231, 232, 234 witch, 214 domestic helper, 11, 48, 60, 73–5, 87, 92, 99, 145–6, 148, 152–5, 178, 180, 193, 198 Douglas, Mary, 86, 128, 134 Drinking, 13, 14, 26, 56, 68, 73, 81, 86, 99, 110–123, 168, 194, 213, 222, 236, 262 drug, 6, 195, 203–210, 214, 215, 216, 220, 227 abuse, 204, 218 cartel, 203 user, 205, 206 Dundes, Alan, 159 Duterte, Rodrigo, 6, 48, 50, 56, 93, 137, 179, 203, 204, 206, 207, 209, 216, 218, 229, 240 E education, xiv, 19, 50, 63, 122, 147, 155, 220, 221, 235, 239, 264 election, 203, 206, 223–237, 240 English, 2, 19, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42, 62, 85, 87, 91, 115, 139, 143, 148, 150, 157, 168, 184, 186 Filipino use of, 7, 14, 21, 63–4, 95, 99–102, 111, 115, 124, 187, 191–192, 201, 245

278 • Index

espiritista, 104, 106, 107, 108, 188. See also spirit, Spiritism, Spiritualism ethnographer, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 ethnography, xii, 8 in the raw, xiv, 3, 5 exchange, 52, 92, 111, 170, 179, 193, 208, 224, 226–230, 262, 267 labour, 5 money, 74 spheres of, xiv See also gift, reciprocity F factory, 47, 54, 55, 59, 146, 147, 152, 233, 236. See also work familiarity, 5 and strangeness, 2, 3, 221–2, 263, 268 family, 4, 9–17, 24, 42, 53, 55, 58, 59, 60, 65, 96, 114, 116–122, 128, 132–3, 137, 145–7, 162, 175, 220, 227, 232, 236, 245–8, 261 business, 239, 240 and Catholicism, 183–5, 197, 241, 264 compound, 17, 25, 26, 47, 78, 83, 94, 104, 108, 116, 119, 156, 191, 207, 266 and exchange, 226–8 extended, 1, 9, 20, 25, 26, 31, 107, 133, 176 Filipino, 9, 37, 75, 266–7 grave, 107, 212–3, 215, 232 head, 46–7 ideology of, 55, 92, 178–9, 198–9, 207, 210, 262 inheritance, 47 Japanese Imperial, 254 names, 10, 20, 33, 37, 38, 169, 172 planning, 50 political, 229, 231, 234 relations, 34, 44–5, 46–52, 69–70, 86–7, 92, 102, 110–11, 150–6, 193, 208, 226, 262, 263 See also Japan Farmer, 10, 18, 21, 78–80, 82, 83, 85, 95, 135, 147, 186, 187, 201, 205,

233–4, 246. See also agriculture, work favours, 20, 92, 208, 226–8, 240. See also bribe, exchange, politician feria, 133, 243, 245, 249–262. See also mud festival fiesta. See feria fieldwork, xiii, 1, 3–5, 206, 266 firearm, 29, 30, 140, 184, 195, 205, 216, 217, 219, 220 folklore, 18 folklorist, 159 food, 25, 49, 54, 60, 63, 65, 77, 85, 88, 89, 91, 93, 117, 118, 120, 143, 166, 168, 173, 177, 189, 194, 205, 212, 215, 218, 220, 224, 227, 233, 257, 262 categories, 85–6 Chinese, 85, 152 cooked, 56, 68, 69, 84–5, 86, 105, 207 exotic, 84, 88, 130 sharing (see commensality) See also cooking, meal, reciprocity Forbes, Bruce David, 196, 199, 200 foreigner, 21, 35, 40, 43, 88, 96, 97, 99, 143, 169, 186–90, 191, 196, 217, 220, 235, 247, 251, 256, 268 foreskin, 126, 127, 128, 130, 157, 176, 179, 221. See also circumcision frame, xiv, 60, 86, 111, 117–8 friendship, 4, 103, 136, 178, 226, 227, 235–6 among domestic workers, 11, 60, 71, 74–7, 153, 178 among classmates, 28–9, 86, 143, 148, 184 between siblings, 35 childhood, 15, 91, 112–3, 115 funeral, 68, 120, 214, 241, 250 parlour, 108, 116, 206, 213 wake, 232 See also death G gambling, 15, 208, 213–4, 261–2. See also betting Geertz, Clifford, 2–3, 157, 158, 162, 170, 174, 178

Index • 279

gender, 33, 38, 41, 59, 68, 87, 92, 112, 115, 125, 127, 155, 170, 178–9, 180, 189, 193, 217, 264 equality, 193 ghost, 66, 67, 81, 106–8, 133, 134, 242, 251, 252 Holy, 239 gift, 48, 76, 92, 105, 110, 143, 178–9, 193, 196 economy, 197 See also exchange, food sharing, reciprocity, St. Valentine’s Day Godbout, Jacques, 92 Goffman, Erving, 222 Goody, Jack, 88 gossip, 81, 203, 208–9, 222 Gray, Catriona, 64 greeting, 94, 95, 144, 187–8, 213, 258 card, 196 guava, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 189, 213 Guggenheim, Scott, 158, 162, 171, 174, 175, 177 H haircut, 121–2 Hamilton-Paterson, James, 96, 111, 125 Hertz, Robert, 90 hierarchy, 88, 90, 175, 229 Hogarth, William, 158 Hong Kong, 1, 11, 17, 25, 27, 47, 48, 60, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74–6, 84, 95, 99, 107, 108, 114, 138, 145, 152–3, 154, 155, 178, 180, 184, 193, 195, 205, 249, 260, 265, 266 house, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 22, 27, 35, 47, 49, 53, 56, 58, 65, 67, 70, 78, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93–4, 97, 100, 101–2, 104, 107, 108 building, 23, 24, 27, 40, 129, 147, 150, 151, 153–4, 178, 208, 266 cleaning, 143, 189, 193, 213 painting, 14, 24, 49, 91, 97, 100, 154, 157, 160 types, 23–26, 112 household, 18, 46, 52, 77, 82, 154, 218 income, 77

humour, 59–60, 154, 184. See also laughter I Iglesia ni Cristo, 50, 80, 108, 118, 182, 183, 238–40 Ilongot, 85 imperialism, 160, 254 Internet, xiii, 3, 71, 74–5, 76, 95, 126, 127, 147, 158, 194, 196, 239, 250 intimidation, 209, 220 irrigation, 5, 18, 78–83, 85, 88, 95, 211. See also rice, system Izanagi, 253–4 Izanami, 253–4 J Japan, xiii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 28, 31, 33, 48, 73, 81, 105, 108, 109, 115, 136–141, 149, 166, 197, 204, 212, 221, 239 Japanese, 27, 35, 68–9, 70, 79, 103, 107, 110, 117, 158, 164, 199 army, 19, 138, 249, 252 drinking, 110–1, 116 economy, 265 folk art, 1, 2 Imperial Family, 254 language, 19, 33, 63, 86, 187–8, 189 occupation, 18, 133, 136–8, 140, 194–5, 202, 249–54 pottery, 1, 3, 5, 52 society, 34, 37, 52, 82, 264–5 Johnson, Mark, 90 K kapré, 35, 104, 188, 190 karrera. See carabao kinship, 5, 46, 47, 82, 171, 177 terms, 5, 33–38 Korea, 9, 17, 110, 265 Korean, 85, 138, 220 L labour, 5, 10, 13, 56, 78, 81, 92, 126, 145, 146, 147, 224, 265. See also work Lakoff, George, 90

280 • Index

land, 13, 16, 18, 25, 47, 66, 81, 82, 83, 88, 147, 221, 229, 233 lord, 10, 160 ownership, 5, 209 plot of, 25, 81, 85, 150, 154, 204, 207–9, 212, 213 language, 34, 38, 58, 61–4, 85, 91, 148, 244 foreign, 2, 4, 5, 17, 19, 99, 144, 149 See also English, loanword, Taglog, Taglish laughter, 7, 14, 16, 21, 42, 58–60, 66, 68, 69, 81, 87, 95, 97, 111, 114, 124, 127, 156, 162, 180, 186, 187, 191, 244–5, 259. See also humour left/right, 41, 89, 90–91, 219, 254 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, xiv, 86 loanword, 2, 62 Luzon, 5, 9, 17, 46, 62, 80, 82, 105, 145, 158, 171, 174, 175, 213, 251, 254, 263 M Magellan, 159, 202 magic, 132, 177, 181, 194, 195, 225, 242, 263 contagious, 98, 122 sympathetic, 121, 140 magician, 214, 263 Makati, 9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 48, 55, 65, 71, 107, 225, 231 Malay, 20, 88, 158 Manalo, Felix, 239. See also Iglesia ni Cristo Manila, 1, 16, 18, 22, 28, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 62, 65, 68, 70, 74, 79, 88, 90, 103, 114, 116, 123, 126, 128, 130, 131, 137, 145, 150, 152, 156, 157, 165, 166, 168, 181, 183, 207, 217, 220, 225, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 241, 243, 261, 265, 266, 267, 268 Metro-, 9, 15, 17, 132, 164 See also Bibiclat Marcos, Ferdinand, 217, 224 market, 18, 66, 78, 79, 157, 228, 229 labour, 146

supermarket, 50, 56, 68, 139, 158, 193, 211–2 marketing, 1, 3, 30, 195, 199 marriage, 20, 28, 35, 39, 42, 45, 50, 51, 103, 1, 192, 198–59, 183, 184, 192, 198–200, 241, 242, 245–8, 253 alliance, 231 arranged, 199 cousin, 50–52, 66, 110, 194 love, 262 matter out of place, 128–9, 134 Mauss, Marcel, 176, 177, 178 mayor, 42, 121, 157, 203, 224, 225, 226, 226, 228, 229 of Aliaga, xii, 157, 227, 230–6 meal, 68, 71, 84, 85, 86–8, 89, 91, 92, 130, 193, 220, 245. See also commensality, rice Mediterranean, the, 25, 150, 226 Middle East, the, 75, 90, 145, 155 migrant worker. See overseas (foreign) worker miracle, 30, 132, 140, 241, 242, 249 Miss Universe, 64, 244 Mitsubishi, 30, 31, 65, 139, 264 Xpander, 30, 31, 32, 49, 61, 65, 103, 116, 139, 165, 266 mobile phone, 13, 43, 71–77, 95, 108, 151, 195, 215, 245, 247, 256 mud, 29, 61, 78, 79, 80, 95, 133, 134, 135, 189, 249, 253, 256 festival, 12, 98, 140, 241, 243, 247–62 people, 249, 254, 257 Muslim, 148, 196 N names, 33–38, 201–202 as classification, 33 of cocks, 158–9 nick, 34, 35, 36, 62 posthumous, 33 See also English, kinship network, 226, 264 Novena, 181–2, 184

Index • 281

Nueva Ecija, 1, 9, 19, 56, 133, 205, 211, 230, 233, 234 O OFW. See overseas (foreign) worker Oriental despotism, 81, 82, 85, 87 outsider, 7, 20, 35, 81, 81, 87, 90, 97, 127, 129, 175, 207, 209, 220–2, 224, 264 overseas (foreign) worker, 3, 48, 145– 155, 176, 178, 179, 180, 198, 240 P Pantabangan, 32, 101–2, 103, 131 participant observation, 2, 4–5 party, 13, 16, 69–70, 86, 87, 90, 109– 122, 143, 150, 156, 250 patriarchy, 179 patron, 173, 228, 230, 262 -client, 134, 178, 180, 227–8, 229, 240, 262 saint, 18, 132, 135, 140, 141, 249 patronage, 175, 226, 228, 240 people, 4–5, 9–17, 40, 54, 67, 72, 89, 99–103, 113, 119, 150, 153, 162, 246, 257 Philippine society, xiv, 3, 178 Philippines, the economy, 48, 54, 264 government, 18, 83, 145, 146, 207, 219, 224, 229, 233, 234, 235, 239 and Japan, 136–7, 138, 139 people of, 11, 16, 62, 85, 105, 152, 198, 241 President of, 6, 48, 50, 56, 77, 179, 206, 207, 217, 218, 224, 229, 244 and Spain, 10, 82, 105, 132, 159, 226, 242 and the United States, 137, 160, 169 Pilipino, 61–4, 135. See also language, Tagalog police, 21, 157, 165, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 216, 227, 251, 262 politician, 15, 146, 169, 205, 206, 207, 223–237, 240, 263

politics, 15, 20, 63, 77, 91, 105, 157, 171, 175–6, 178, 184, 204, 224, 226, 232, 236, 241, 261 clientele, 228, 229–230, 240 See also bossism, system power, 20, 37, 59, 82, 83, 121, 128, 134, 140, 157, 160, 171, 175, 178, 220, 224–5, 226–8, 253, 259, 261–2 buying, 234 economic, 137, 230 people’s, 77, 229 relation, 171, 172 soft, 138–9 Western, 138 prestige, 179 priest, 43, 118, 160, 177, 182, 184, 241, 256 privilege, 227, 240 Q Quezon City, 164, 165, 223 R rank, 227, 264–5, 266 reciprocity, xiv, 9, 91–2, 105, 179, 226–9 generalised, 91 See also exchange, food sharing, gift redistribution, 227, 228, 261, 262 religion, 63, 141, 240, 252, 253 new, 105, 198, 239 remittance, 48, 49, 146, 151, 209 economy, 146 rice, 7, 21, 61, 82, 83, 84–92, 138, 139, 142, 143, 204, 262 agriculture, 82, 86, 159 basin/bowl, 1, 9, 211, 233, 263 crop, 79, 80 cultivation, 85, 92 field, 15, 16, 19, 53, 61, 80, 96, 201, 211, 254 as food, 44, 68, 72, 84–5, 86–7, 109, 118, 212 mill, 147, 229 seedling, 79, 95 transplanting, 46, 79, 81, 228

282 • Index

wholesaler, 21 See also irrigation, meal rite, 133, 134, 176–7, 180, 181, 196, 200, 242 of passage, 197 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholicism, Catholic Church romance, 128, 193, 197–200, 205. See also Valentine’s Day S Sacred Heart, 196 sacrifice, 2, 3, 134, 149, 155, 176–80, 192, 197, 200, 264 Sahlins, Marshall, xiv, 92 Saudi Arabia, 15, 48, 112, 114, 143, 146–8, 149, 155, 176, 189, 195, 197 school, 2, 7, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 47, 50, 53, 54, 55, 65, 138, 152, 155, 180, 186, 187, 197, 201, 205, 224, 227, 228, 250 boarding, 36–7, 77, 196 classmate, 15, 86, 114, 128, 146, 150 elementary/primary, 56, 86, 146, 191, 235 friend, 28, 35, 143, 184, 244 high, 48, 51, 116, 128, 193, 195, 225, 231, 235, 246 secondary, 19 uniform, 189 Schumpeter, Joseph, 179 security guard, 17, 29, 30, 166, 217–222 sentensyador, 163, 164, 173, 174, 177 Shintō, 141, 253, 254 shopping, 147, 193, 218 mall, 73, 88, 117, 166, 169, 196, 217, 218, 234, 238 Sidel, John, 224, 229 smell, 104, 105, 148, 188, 189, 190, 258 social, 36, 81, 146, 169, 176, 199, 200, 229, 241, 250 alliance, 171 body, 122 bonding, 189 capital, 241 class, 33

cohesion, 36, 59 consciousness, 200 discourse, 221 distinction, 86, 134 group, 17, 133, 197 media, 71–77, 180, 198, 205, 242 norm, 59, 144 order, 59–60, 90, 128, 134, 190 position, 160, 258 relations, 92, 175, 226 status, 48, 60, 87, 178, 226 stratification, 88 structure, 175 Spain, 8, 76, 81, 82, 85, 91, 133, 160, 226 Spanish, 2, 10, 19, 20, 24, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 61, 62, 63, 78, 81, 84, 87, 88, 91, 104, 105, 132, 157, 159, 160, 184, 206, 213, 229, 260 spirit, 66–7, 70, 81, 104–8, 122, 143, 174, 189, 242 Holy Spirit, 182, 241, 253 Spiritism, 105–6 Spiritualism, 105–6 St. John the Baptist. See Bautista, San Juan stranger. See outsider sumō, 166–7 superstition, 126, 128, 143. See also belief symbol, 24, 42, 45, 77, 90, 91, 121, 160, 196, 253 status, 72, 76 (see also social status) symbolism, 89, 91, 126, 128, 134, 175, 176, 178, 182, 189 system, 35, 2, 128, 149, 178, 228, 235, 241, 264 irrigation, 81–3, 88, 254 (see also irrigation) political, 25, 26, 224, 226, 229, 236, 262 (see also politician, politics) T Tagalog, 2, 7, 19, 29, 33, 38, 42, 61, 62, 63–4, 85, 86, 91, 97, 102, 118, 159, 188, 192, 195, 201, 211, 213, 215, 247, 256

Index • 283

Taglish, 63, 64 Talavera, 20, 24, 53, 56, 131, 194, 221, 223 taong putik. See mud festival Tarlac, 22, 47, 106, 243 television, 48, 76, 78, 136, 167, 198, 207, 223, 239, 243, 256, 264 programme, 76, 107, 118, 146 soap, 71, 75 Tottenham Hotspur, 158 tradition, 24, 48, 75, 77, 128, 133, 148, 151, 158, 159, 253, 263 invention of, 199 U uniform, 219, 220 United States, 2, 6, 81, 106, 138, 140, 149, 158, 160, 169, 179, 196, 197, 198, 206, 220, 224, 238, 265 V Valentine’s Day, 2, 193–200, 242, 250 violence, 16, 127, 179, 197, 198, 200, 204, 206, 218, 229 Virgin Mary, the, 131, 132, 134, 181, 182, 183, 241 Visayas, 35, 51, 62, 127 Visoria, 15, 16, 17, 20, 50, 55, 62, 63, 99, 102, 109, 116, 208, 209 vote, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 231, 240, 241 buying, 20, 224, 236 See also bribe, election, politician

W wage, 13, 48, 54, 55–6, 74, 110, 123, 153, 163, 180, 219–20, 224 water buffalo. See carabao wedding, 39–45, 49, 117, 128, 143, 184, 198, 200, 230, 243–248, 250. See also marriage, Valentine’s Day Wikipedia, 20, 188 Wittfogel, Karl, 81–2, 83 World Slasher Cup, 163, 164, 166, 171, 179, 261 work, xiii, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 22, 27, 47, 48, 49, 53–5, 56, 58, 75, 91, 99, 111, 112, 114, 123, 126, 139, 143, 145–55, 166, 176, 178–80, 183, 184, 189, 193, 195, 197, 201, 220, 227, 228, 230, 234, 235, 241, 246 agricultural, 53, 79–81, 92, 105, 188, 205 factory, 15, 54–5 See also labour, overseas (foreign) worker writing, xii–xiv, 4–5, 88, 91, 166, 199, 256, 263 Y ylang-ylang, 104, 105, 106, 188, 241 Z Zialcita, Fernando, 82, 132 zodiac, 28, 67