Filomeno V Aguilar
Biographic Data
| ID | 80600 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Filomeno V Aguilar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Filomeno V |
| FAMILY NAME | Aguilar |
| SIGNATURE | AGUILAR F V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ateneo de Manila University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 257 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The 1812 Cádiz Constitution: Liberalism and the Colonial Regime in the Spanish Philippines
The Termination of Tribute in the Spanish Philippines in 1884: The Treasury and Spanish Sovereignty
Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints is an internationally refereed journal that publishes scholarly articles and other materials on the history of the Philippines and its peoples, both in the homeland and overseas. It believes the past is illuminated by historians as well as scholars from other disciplines; at the same time, it prefers ethnographic approaches to the history of the present. It welcomes works that are theoret…
A rejoinder
In his response to my review of his book, Ulbe Bosma reiterates that high demographic growth and the consequent abundance of surplus labor as well as local systems of labor control were important factors in the peripheralization of Island Southeast Asia. Colonialism itself, he argues, is not responsible for the making of a periphery
Relational Nation: The Appreciation of Characters in Rizal’s Noli me tángere in Two Philippine Public High Schools
Rice, Culture and Ideology
Rice played different roles throughout Filipino history. A magical item in ancient times up to Middle Ages, rice transformed to a consumer product whose consumption reflects the stratification of the Filipino society. From a central cultural element in the Philippines islands rice was gradually downgraded to a side cultural detail due to its commodisation, urbanisation, industrialisation and the Green Revolution. However, in our times rice starte…
Escuela Náutica de Manila: Scientific Education in the Spanish Philippines
Science education in the nineteenth-century Philippines has been portrayed as highly deficient, yet pockets of respectable scientific education existed. The Escuela Náutica de Manila, which opened in 1820, offered such an education. This article narrates its establishment and discusses its changing curricular offerings in relation to empire-wide initiatives and constraints internal to the Philippines. Its quality of scientific education can be gl…
Gregorio Sancianco, Colonial Tribute, and Social Identities: On the Cusp of Filipino Nationalist Consciousness
Gregorio Sancianco, the author of El Progreso de Filipinas (1881), is an ephemeral figure in Philippine history. Although somewhat known for his defense of the native against charges of indolence, Sancianco advanced a penetrating critique of colonial tribute that generally has been ignored but to which this article draws attention. Sancianco argued that tribute did not only negate the principle of assimilation, but it also divided the native popu…
Political Conjuncture and Scholarly Disjunctures: Reflections on Studies of the Philippine State under Marcos
This professorial address contends that a scholarly, systematic, and impartial study of Marcos's authoritarian rule is necessary, given the highly politicized interpretations of the past bequeathed to younger generations through textbooks and social media as well as the Philippine academic community's general inability to analyze the defunct regime and to influence public discourse and shape public history. Social scientists must tap new sources …
Ritual Passage and the Reconstruction of Selfhood in International Labour Migration
Horacio de la Costa, Foreign Missionaries, and the Quest for Filipinization: The Church in the Age of Decolonization
Fr. Horacio de la Costa became the first Filipino Superior of the Jesuit Province in the Philippines (1964–1970) at a time when the Filipinization of religious orders was intensely contested. As a young priest, De la Costa sought the training of more Filipino priests so that the Catholic Church would "take root" in the country. Filipinization, however, entailed two further questions: Filipino assumption of leadership positions and the role of for…
Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island
This text illuminates the oral traditions of the Philippines and the convergence of capitalism and the indigenous spirit world. The author examines the social relations, cultural meanings and political struggles surrounding the rise of sugar haciendas on Negros during the late Spanish colonial period, and their subsequent transformation under the aegis of the American colonial state. Drawing on oral history, interviews and a wide array of sources…
Colonial sugar production in the Spanish Philippines: Calamba and Negros compared
This article presents two modes of export-oriented sugar hacienda production in the late-nineteenth-century Spanish Philippines. The Hacienda de Calamba epitomised a large-scale estate under a religious corporation; it was an enclave economy reliant on local capital and technology. In contrast, Negros showcased a range of haciendas of varying sizes in a frontier setting involving different ethnicities and supported by capital and technology media…
Towards Community Formation in Southeast Asia? History Education, Asean and the Nation-State
In 2003 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations declared the establishment of an ASEAN Community. The teaching of regional history is seen as indispensable to the attainment of this goal. Eight country reports commissioned by UNESCO Bangkok in 2013 serve as the basis of an inquiry into history education and the teaching of Southeast Asian history in primary and secondary schools. State control of education has produced school systems that, des…
Disasters as Contingent Events: Volcanic Eruptions, State Advisories, and Public Participation in the Twentieth-century Philippines
By revisiting the eruptions of Taal in 1911, Hibok-Hibok in 1951, and Pinatubo in 1991, this article interrogates Greg Bankoff’s argument that “cultures of disaster” in the Philippines produce “coping mechanisms” manifested in public apathy and the state’s failure at mitigation. It argues for historical contingency as illustrated by the relative success at disaster mitigation in Pinatubo’s case, despite extreme challenges. It highlights the warni…
Romancing Tropicality: Ilustrado Portraits of the Climate in the Late Nineteenth Century
In contrast to the literature’s dominant focus on Western constructions of tropicality, this article explores representations of the tropics by the colonized, specifically the climatological conditions of the Philippines as portrayed in the late nineteenth century by the Europe-based native intellectuals known as ilustrados. Their anticolonial sentiment was intertwined with visceral estrangement from Spain and idealized views of the tropics, whic…
The educational attainment of the second generation and transnational shame: Toward deeper comparative analysis
Church-State Relations in the 1899 Malolos Constitution: Filipinization and Visions of National Community
The most contentious issue in the Revolutionary Congress that crafted the 1899 Malolos Constitution pertained to the separation of church and state, which won by a mere one vote. Until now this episode in Philippine history has not received a satisfactory explanation, which this article seeks to offer. The debate in Malolos, as argued here, was profoundly divisive because the two sides were driven by differing visions of national community. A cru…
Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age
Since the 1960s, overseas migration has become a major factor in the economy of the Philippines. It has also profoundly influenced the sense of nationhood of both migrants and nonmigrants. Migrant workers learned to view their home country as part of a plural world of nations, and they shaped a new sort of Filipino identity while appropriating the modernity of the outside world, where at least for a while they operated as insiders. The global nom…
Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age
Keeping the State at Bay: The Killing of Journalists in the Philippines, 1998-2012
In Southeast Asia the Philippines holds the distinction of reporting the highest number of murdered journalists between 1992 and 2012. This record makes the Philippines closer to countries in other parts of the world characterized as “transitional” democracies. These countries enjoy near full press freedom, but their institutional setting allows the perpetrators of crimes to evade accountability. The authors of this article argue that explaining …
Rice and Magic: A Cultural History from the Precolonial World to the Present
Beliefs in rice spirits were integral to the magical worldview of the precolonial inhabitants of the Philippine islands. Under Spanish colonialism, rice became a staple but it underwent disenchantment and symbolic marginality. By the 1870s rice production fell short relative to demand. Twentieth-century initiatives to address persistent shortages culminated in the 1960s Green Revolution, which further altered the rice plant and ushered in the age…
Brother's keeper? Siblingship, overseas migration, and centripetal ethnography in a Philippine village
The Western optic of 'nuclear family', which is devoid of the individual's embeddedness in the larger kin group, fails to explain the commitment of overseas Filipino migrants to the 'extended family'. Yet, it underpins much of the qualitative field methods today. To explain interdependencies as well as tensions within kin groups, this article proposes a shift in theoretical ground from a 'sociology of the family' to 'cultures of relatedness'. To …
The Republic of Negros
Cet article se penche sur les differentes acceptions recouvertes par la notion de Republique de Negros dans l'historiographie des Philippines. L'A. cherche a montrer que dans le contexte revolutionnaire de la fin du XIX siecle aux Philippines, l'apellation Republique de Negros reflete mal le statut et les particularites de l'Ile de Negros, marquee par les interets des plantations sucrieres et par l'acceptation du protectorat americain
Benito Lim: Philippine Citizenship through Mass Naturalization, a Dictator's Largesse
Differentiating Sedimented from Modular Transnationalism: The View from East Asia
The dominant literature on transnationalism regards it as an alternative way of framing immigration, but the a priori exclusion of labor migrants from the scope of migrant transnationalism is untenable. Evidence from East Asia suggests that labor migrants, who are compelled by the prevailing policy regime in the region to become sojourners, engage in what can be called modular transnationalism. Labor migrants are East Asia's prototypical transmig…
Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island
This text illuminates the oral traditions of the Philippines and the convergence of capitalism and the indigenous spirit world. The author examines the social relations, cultural meanings and political struggles surrounding the rise of sugar haciendas on Negros during the late Spanish colonial period, and their subsequent transformation under the aegis of the American colonial state. Drawing on oral history, interviews and a wide array of sources…
Labour Migration and Ties of Relatedness: Diasporic Houses and Investments in Memory in a Rural Philippine Village
Putting migrant remittances into house construction and rebuilding is generally seen as either conspicuous consumption or productive investment, but in both cases the perspective is economistic. This article argues that only when the cultural dimension of economic action is understood will it be possible to comprehend migrant spending on houses. Specifically, this article seeks to understand why, in the case of the rural Tagalog village in this s…
Tracing Origins: IlustradoNationalism and the Racial Science of Migration Waves
Research Article| August 01 2005 Tracing Origins: Ilustrado Nationalism and the Racial Science of Migration Waves Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr [email protected] is Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Institute of Philippine Culture at Ateneo de Manila University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Asian Studies (2005) 64 (3): 605–637. https://doi.org/10.1017/S00219118…
Ritual Passage and the Reconstruction of Selfhood in International Labour Migration
This paper reasserts the place of human agency amid the structural forces that seem to overdetermine international labour migration. To explore the meanings attached by migrants to overseas employment, the paper casts the worker's experience as a type of ritual, a secular pilgrimage knowingly embarked upon by the individual in close dialectical relationship with the social world. Various stages of double liminality are endured by the migrant work…
The triumph of instrumental citizenship? Migrations, identities, and the nation‐state in Southeast Asia
Citizenship, Inheritance, and the Indigenizing of “ Orang Chinese” In Indonesia
Research Article| August 01 2001 Citizenship, Inheritance, and the Indigenizing of "OrangChinese" In Indonesia Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr. Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2001) 9 (3): 501–533. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9-3-501 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Filomeno V. Aguilar; Citizenship, Inheritance, and the Ind…
Brother's keeper? Siblingship, overseas migration, and centripetal ethnography in a Philippine village
The Western optic of 'nuclear family', which is devoid of the individual's embeddedness in the larger kin group, fails to explain the commitment of overseas Filipino migrants to the 'extended family'. Yet, it underpins much of the qualitative field methods today. To explain interdependencies as well as tensions within kin groups, this article proposes a shift in theoretical ground from a 'sociology of the family' to 'cultures of relatedness'. To …
Beyond Inevitability: The Opening of Philippine Provincial Ports in 1855
The opening of Philippine provincial ports to the world market in 1855 served to solidify the direct incorporation of regions outside Manila into the international capitalist system. This article reconstructs the events surrounding this important episode by situating it in the context of global capitalist dynamics and Spanish imperial decay, and the conjuncture in which local interest groups manoeuvred to intervene in the colonial state processes…
The Philippine peasant as capitalist: Beyond the categories of ideal-typical capitalism
As elsewhere, Marxist discussions about the peasantry in the Philippines have also been informed by 'articulation theory' which renders it difficult to conceive of peasants as full participants in the capitalist labour process either as 'capitalists' or 'proletarians'. This conceptual difficulty is traced to ideal-typical presuppositions about capitalism and its 'standard' form of productive relations. The conventional categories of Marxism thus …
Manilamen and seafaring: Engaging the maritime world beyond the Spanish realm
Although the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others …
Towards Community Formation in Southeast Asia? History Education, Asean and the Nation-State
In 2003 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations declared the establishment of an ASEAN Community. The teaching of regional history is seen as indispensable to the attainment of this goal. Eight country reports commissioned by UNESCO Bangkok in 2013 serve as the basis of an inquiry into history education and the teaching of Southeast Asian history in primary and secondary schools. State control of education has produced school systems that, des…
Romancing Tropicality: Ilustrado Portraits of the Climate in the Late Nineteenth Century
In contrast to the literature’s dominant focus on Western constructions of tropicality, this article explores representations of the tropics by the colonized, specifically the climatological conditions of the Philippines as portrayed in the late nineteenth century by the Europe-based native intellectuals known as ilustrados. Their anticolonial sentiment was intertwined with visceral estrangement from Spain and idealized views of the tropics, whic…
Keeping the State at Bay: The Killing of Journalists in the Philippines, 1998-2012
In Southeast Asia the Philippines holds the distinction of reporting the highest number of murdered journalists between 1992 and 2012. This record makes the Philippines closer to countries in other parts of the world characterized as “transitional” democracies. These countries enjoy near full press freedom, but their institutional setting allows the perpetrators of crimes to evade accountability. The authors of this article argue that explaining …
Filibustero, Rizal, and the Manilamen of the Nineteenth Century
This article traces the provenance and the multiple layers of meaning, as well as the contradictions encoded, in the word filibustero from its origins among pirates in the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the American military adventurers in the nineteenth century, whose complex politics intersected with proindependence Cuban exiles. This history illumines the word's specific meaning as it entered the Philippines before 187…
Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age
Since the 1960s, overseas migration has become a major factor in the economy of the Philippines. It has also profoundly influenced the sense of nationhood of both migrants and nonmigrants. Migrant workers learned to view their home country as part of a plural world of nations, and they shaped a new sort of Filipino identity while appropriating the modernity of the outside world, where at least for a while they operated as insiders. The global nom…
Nationhood and Transborder Labor Migrations: The Late Twentieth Century from a Late Nineteenth-Century Perspective
This paper seeks to provide a perspective on contemporary Philippine labor migrations by viewing this phenomenon in light of analogous transborder movements of workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on information about so-called Manilla men in Australia and British Malaya, the paper discusses living and working conditions of migrant workers in the earlier period. The paper takes up the broader context of indentured w…
Political Conjuncture and Scholarly Disjunctures: Reflections on Studies of the Philippine State under Marcos
This professorial address contends that a scholarly, systematic, and impartial study of Marcos's authoritarian rule is necessary, given the highly politicized interpretations of the past bequeathed to younger generations through textbooks and social media as well as the Philippine academic community's general inability to analyze the defunct regime and to influence public discourse and shape public history. Social scientists must tap new sources …
Ritual Passage and the Reconstruction of Selfhood in International Labour Migration
Colonial sugar production in the Spanish Philippines: Calamba and Negros compared
This article presents two modes of export-oriented sugar hacienda production in the late-nineteenth-century Spanish Philippines. The Hacienda de Calamba epitomised a large-scale estate under a religious corporation; it was an enclave economy reliant on local capital and technology. In contrast, Negros showcased a range of haciendas of varying sizes in a frontier setting involving different ethnicities and supported by capital and technology media…
Rice and Magic: A Cultural History from the Precolonial World to the Present
Beliefs in rice spirits were integral to the magical worldview of the precolonial inhabitants of the Philippine islands. Under Spanish colonialism, rice became a staple but it underwent disenchantment and symbolic marginality. By the 1870s rice production fell short relative to demand. Twentieth-century initiatives to address persistent shortages culminated in the 1960s Green Revolution, which further altered the rice plant and ushered in the age…
Benedict Anderson, Comparatively Speaking: On Area Studies, Theory, and "Gentlemanly" Polemics
Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson, the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government, and Asian Studies at Cornell University and a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of Philippine Studies, is one of the world's most influential thinkers. Born in Kunming, China, on 26 August 1936, Anderson's father was an official in the Imperial Maritime Customs in China and a Sinophile. An Irish citizen, Anderson …
Sugar planter-state relations and labour processes in Colonial PhilippineHaciendas
Contrary to a prevailing view that the coercive power of the colonial state facilitated planter control of labour and the introduction of wage-labour relations in the sugar haciendas of Negros Island in the late nineteenth century, this article presents new evidence to argue that sharecropping was the predominant mechanism for the generation and extraction of surplus and that the supposed planter-state alliance was non-existent during this period…
Benito Lim: Philippine Citizenship through Mass Naturalization, a Dictator's Largesse
The Riddle of the Alien-Citizen: Filipino Migrants as US Nationals and the Anomalies of Citizenship, 1900s–1930s
This article interrogates the classification of Filipino migrants in the United States as US nationals, during the period of American sovereignty in the Philippines. It reveals the history behind this legal status by looking at two broad aspects. Firstly, this article narrates the circumstances that led to the creation of Philippine citizenship even if the Philippines was not a sovereign state. This citizenship had legal force only because Filipi…
Experiencing Transcendence: Filipino Conversion Narratives and the Localization of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity
In contrast to functionalist explanations for the spread of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, this article discursively analyzes conversion narratives to understand the localization of a global cultural phenomenon. The narratives were drawn from interviews, conducted in 2005, with members of the El Shaddai and Jesus-is-Lord movements. Approached from the perspective of critical realism, the narratives embody a diversity of plots, creative…
The Philippine peasant as capitalist: Beyond the categories of ideal-typical capitalism
As elsewhere, Marxist discussions about the peasantry in the Philippines have also been informed by 'articulation theory' which renders it difficult to conceive of peasants as full participants in the capitalist labour process either as 'capitalists' or 'proletarians'. This conceptual difficulty is traced to ideal-typical presuppositions about capitalism and its 'standard' form of productive relations. The conventional categories of Marxism thus …
Beyond Inevitability: The Opening of Philippine Provincial Ports in 1855
The opening of Philippine provincial ports to the world market in 1855 served to solidify the direct incorporation of regions outside Manila into the international capitalist system. This article reconstructs the events surrounding this important episode by situating it in the context of global capitalist dynamics and Spanish imperial decay, and the conjuncture in which local interest groups manoeuvred to intervene in the colonial state processes…
Sugar planter-state relations and labour processes in Colonial PhilippineHaciendas
Contrary to a prevailing view that the coercive power of the colonial state facilitated planter control of labour and the introduction of wage-labour relations in the sugar haciendas of Negros Island in the late nineteenth century, this article presents new evidence to argue that sharecropping was the predominant mechanism for the generation and extraction of surplus and that the supposed planter-state alliance was non-existent during this period…
Masonic Myths and Revolutionary Feats in Negros Occidental
The popular interpretations of the end of Spanish colonial rule in Negros Occidental, Philippines, are closely intertwined with Masonic-related imageries that suffused the colony's export-oriented economy in general and the province's sugar industry in particular. Through an investigation of folklore as a bearer of historical consciousness, it is argued that the elite-led one-day uprising that led to Spain's downfall in the province contained a m…
The Triumph of Instrumental Citizenship? Migrations, Identities, and the Nation‐State in Southeast Asia
The triumph of instrumental citizenship? Migrations, identities, and the nation‐state in Southeast Asia
Ritual Passage and the Reconstruction of Selfhood in International Labour Migration
This paper reasserts the place of human agency amid the structural forces that seem to overdetermine international labour migration. To explore the meanings attached by migrants to overseas employment, the paper casts the worker's experience as a type of ritual, a secular pilgrimage knowingly embarked upon by the individual in close dialectical relationship with the social world. Various stages of double liminality are endured by the migrant work…
Nationhood and Transborder Labor Migrations: The Late Twentieth Century from a Late Nineteenth-Century Perspective
This paper seeks to provide a perspective on contemporary Philippine labor migrations by viewing this phenomenon in light of analogous transborder movements of workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on information about so-called Manilla men in Australia and British Malaya, the paper discusses living and working conditions of migrant workers in the earlier period. The paper takes up the broader context of indentured w…
Citizenship, Inheritance, and the Indigenizing of “ Orang Chinese” In Indonesia
Research Article| August 01 2001 Citizenship, Inheritance, and the Indigenizing of "OrangChinese" In Indonesia Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr. Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2001) 9 (3): 501–533. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9-3-501 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Filomeno V. Aguilar; Citizenship, Inheritance, and the Ind…
Global Migrations, Old Forms of Labor, and New Transborder Class Relations
With the labor market fed by international migrations, global capitalism has seen a resurgence of archaic forms of labor in certain industries since the 1970s. The old capitalist strategy of employing multiethnic workforces has resurfaced in seafaring and transnational construction, which rely mainly on migrant male workers. In Western economies, the hiring of servants was thought to be a thing of the past, but today female migrants are widely em…
"Excess Possibilities? Ethics, Populism and Community Economy. A Commentary on j.k. Gibson-Graham's "Surplus Possibilities: Postdevelopment and Community Economies
Tracing Origins: IlustradoNationalism and the Racial Science of Migration Waves
Research Article| August 01 2005 Tracing Origins: Ilustrado Nationalism and the Racial Science of Migration Waves Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr [email protected] is Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Institute of Philippine Culture at Ateneo de Manila University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Asian Studies (2005) 64 (3): 605–637. https://doi.org/10.1017/S00219118…
Experiencing Transcendence: Filipino Conversion Narratives and the Localization of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity
In contrast to functionalist explanations for the spread of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, this article discursively analyzes conversion narratives to understand the localization of a global cultural phenomenon. The narratives were drawn from interviews, conducted in 2005, with members of the El Shaddai and Jesus-is-Lord movements. Approached from the perspective of critical realism, the narratives embody a diversity of plots, creative…
The Anti-Development State: The Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines - by Walden Bello, with Herbert Docena, Marissa de Guzman and Marylou Malig
Rice in the Filipino Diet and Culture
This paper deals with a basic question: How central is rice to Philippine culture, as gleaned from its role in Filipino material and cultural life? To answer this question, this paper focuses on the structural position of most Filipinos vis-a-vis rice. Economic changes have rendered most Filipinos, even in rural areas, as consumers rather than as producers of rice. Today, rice reflects the stratification of Philippine society, as supported by the…
Experiencing Transcendence: Filipino Conversion Narratives and the Localization of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity
In contrast to functionalist explanations for the spread of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, this article discursively analyzes conversion narratives to understand the localization of a global cultural phenomenon. The narratives were drawn from interviews, conducted in 2005, with members of the El Shaddai and Jesus-is-Lord movements. Approached from the perspective of critical realism, the narratives embody a diversity of plots, creative…
Labour Migration and Ties of Relatedness: Diasporic Houses and Investments in Memory in a Rural Philippine Village
Putting migrant remittances into house construction and rebuilding is generally seen as either conspicuous consumption or productive investment, but in both cases the perspective is economistic. This article argues that only when the cultural dimension of economic action is understood will it be possible to comprehend migrant spending on houses. Specifically, this article seeks to understand why, in the case of the rural Tagalog village in this s…
The Riddle of the Alien-Citizen: Filipino Migrants as US Nationals and the Anomalies of Citizenship, 1900s–1930s
This article interrogates the classification of Filipino migrants in the United States as US nationals, during the period of American sovereignty in the Philippines. It reveals the history behind this legal status by looking at two broad aspects. Firstly, this article narrates the circumstances that led to the creation of Philippine citizenship even if the Philippines was not a sovereign state. This citizenship had legal force only because Filipi…
The Republic of Negros
Cet article se penche sur les differentes acceptions recouvertes par la notion de Republique de Negros dans l'historiographie des Philippines. L'A. cherche a montrer que dans le contexte revolutionnaire de la fin du XIX siecle aux Philippines, l'apellation Republique de Negros reflete mal le statut et les particularites de l'Ile de Negros, marquee par les interets des plantations sucrieres et par l'acceptation du protectorat americain
Benito Lim: Philippine Citizenship through Mass Naturalization, a Dictator's Largesse
Differentiating Sedimented from Modular Transnationalism: The View from East Asia
The dominant literature on transnationalism regards it as an alternative way of framing immigration, but the a priori exclusion of labor migrants from the scope of migrant transnationalism is untenable. Evidence from East Asia suggests that labor migrants, who are compelled by the prevailing policy regime in the region to become sojourners, engage in what can be called modular transnationalism. Labor migrants are East Asia's prototypical transmig…
Filibustero, Rizal, and the Manilamen of the Nineteenth Century
This article traces the provenance and the multiple layers of meaning, as well as the contradictions encoded, in the word filibustero from its origins among pirates in the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the American military adventurers in the nineteenth century, whose complex politics intersected with proindependence Cuban exiles. This history illumines the word's specific meaning as it entered the Philippines before 187…
Benedict Anderson, Comparatively Speaking: On Area Studies, Theory, and "Gentlemanly" Polemics
Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson, the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government, and Asian Studies at Cornell University and a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of Philippine Studies, is one of the world's most influential thinkers. Born in Kunming, China, on 26 August 1936, Anderson's father was an official in the Imperial Maritime Customs in China and a Sinophile. An Irish citizen, Anderson …
Manilamen and seafaring: Engaging the maritime world beyond the Spanish realm
Although the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others …
Rice and Magic: A Cultural History from the Precolonial World to the Present
Beliefs in rice spirits were integral to the magical worldview of the precolonial inhabitants of the Philippine islands. Under Spanish colonialism, rice became a staple but it underwent disenchantment and symbolic marginality. By the 1870s rice production fell short relative to demand. Twentieth-century initiatives to address persistent shortages culminated in the 1960s Green Revolution, which further altered the rice plant and ushered in the age…
Political science (41 works) · Philippine History and Culture (35 works) · Law (32 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Law (28 works) · History (25 works) · History (24 works) · Politics (21 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (15 works) · Economics (14 works)