Horacio de la Costa: The Background of Nationalism and Other Essays – History and Philippine Culture

I. Problem: difficulty of defining our national culture as clearly and accurately as we would wish
a. What is Filipino culture? How do we define generalization
b. How to answer?
i. Food
ii. Customs, traditions
c. Difficult to come up with accurate presentation for it
II. Reasons
a. Our knowledge of the past is spotty
i. We can’t define Ph CULTURE bc we do not know our past
ii. We know things about a certain segment of our past, but not as much
1. We only know 19th century, nothing furthers
iii. About other periods and aspects = hardly anything
1. Nothing
2. Population
3. Wealth
a. Indication = number of people that serve you
b. We do know enough of the grand lines of our historical development, to venture certain
very broad generalizations about our national culture
i. We do have enough knowledge to attempt certain generalizations
ii. Generalizations
1. our culture is made up of many elements of widely different
provenance (source/ORIGINS)
a. Hinduized SEA communities and their muslim successors
i. ~Indian culture
1. Indonesia = Borobodur/ Hindu Temple
2. Thailand/Myanmar = Buddhist temple
3. Cambodia = Ankor Wat
4. Buddhism
a. Northern India
b. China = influenced by india
i. Indigenized/localized Buddhism
5. Islam
a. Malaysia/Sumatra/Indonesia
b. Chinese Influences
i. Perhaps even earlier bc trade with communities in
archipelagos
ii. The Chinese would migrate to the PH in great numbers
and form communities
iii. Stay bc they provide goods and services only they can
provide
 1. Stone/lime/cement
2. Natives did not build stone things
c. Spanish influences
d. Anglo-saxon/ ANGLO-AMERICAN
e. Our national culture: developed not in isolation (like Chinese
culture?); its components:
i. Original capital
1. What exactly this og thing from which we began
ii. kept being added to from many sources outside our
borders, from far and near, from Europe as well as Asia
2. Cultural borrowings from abroad did not long remain in their original
state among us; these intrusive cultures did not only do something to
us, we did something to them; we assimilated them, changing what was
originally foreign substance into our own, even if the rate and degree of
assimilation varied considerably…
a. not only did they do something to us but we also did something
to them
i. Noodles
1. From Chinese
2. PH: Made it pansit (assimilated)
b. Assimilated
i. It was not the same taste, or depth everywhere
c. Ex
i. Architecture
ii. Kundiman
3. while it is possible to speak of a national culture common to the
Philippines as a whole, we must expect significant horizontal and
vertical variations… For example:
a. Vertical = classes/social classes
b. Horizontal = region/barangay/province
c. Ex
i. Highland vs Lowland culture
1. Mountain communities = less hispanized
2. Very hard to make distinctions since internet
and globalization and technology
ii. Urban vs Rural communities
III. Summary
a. first: from the very earliest times to the present these islands have been subjected to an
almost continual stream of cultural influences from without;
b. second: Filipinos reacted to these influences not by rejecting them or simply imitating
them but by assimilating them, more or less successfully, into their cultural heritage;
i. culture was porous and we were eager to assimilate their experiences
 c. this process of acculturation (localization) varied horizontally, from region to region, and
vertically, from class to class, resulting in significant differences within a recognizably
common culture…
i. now = differences are becoming more and more glaring
1. you have areas which are becoming enclaved (bgc/qc)
2. they have moer things in common among themselves
3. differences are glaring bt a city in manila or a town in sulu
4. urban vs rural
ii. nothing is monolithic/monochromatic
IV. important practical consequences
a. our national culture is vastly more complex than would appear at first glance
b. it is complex for various reasons:
i. multiplicity of its components
ii. diversity of origins of these components
iii. variety and delicacy of their articulation with each other and with the whole
iv. Complexity therefore, but also the realization that to distinguish what is
indigenous from what is foreign in our culture is an extremely risky
undertaking…
1. We identify Filipino with a nation/indigenous culture
2. Fil culture is identified in nativist terms (
a. Nayong Filipino
3. More on complexity
a. ) it seems that our national culture is a wholly foreign culture
i. We oprate on a prejudice and beat ourselves for not
being Asian
b. b) it seems that there is nothing foreign about our national
culture: there is hardly any external factor impinging on our
culture which we have not colored by our attitudes and shaped
to our purposes
c. c) so perhaps categories like “foreign” and “indigenous” are
NOT helpful at all…
V. But not only risky, but also a pointless undertaking…for if our aim is to arrive at a definition of
what Filipino culture is, it is certainly not by such a process of selection that we shall arrive at it…
a. Confusion between “national” and “indigenous”, an arbitrary equation the national does
not equate to indigenous
i. When we say national we do not mean indigenous
b. Our national culture is not what we had in the beginning, it is what we have today…
i. Good point
ii. What we have today IS Filipino culture
iii. Even Filipino is constructed/produed and open to influences
iv. Continues to assimilate
v. If ther eis any one word that characterized Filipinos = “Negotiation”
 VI. This is what history at the moment can tell us; can it tell us anything more? It can, but only if 1)
we clear away certain misconceptions and 2) take certain positive measures (more
research/reflection)
VII. IN THE FIRST PLACE: we must get rid of the idea that the task which faces the historian today is
merely a task of reinterpretation – of interpreting correctly what his predecessors interpreted
wrongly
a. The data is already there = interpret/reinterpret
b. DLC: Do more research/discover more about our ancestors
VIII. A false assumption underlies this misconception: that the materials are there to be interpreted,
that all or most of the evidence relevant to the main phases of our historical development has
been submitted, and that it is now merely a question of revising the construction that has been
placed upon the evidence. It is rather the case that the usable evidence is fragmentary and
incomplete. There is need for archival research and gathering of data…
a. Example again: the Tobacco Monopoly… The point: revision cannot begin with revision;
it must begin with research.3
IX. Two alternatives open to one who wants to write on the history of the Philippines but does not
want to do research:
a. Repetition
b. Conjecture (speculation)
X. IN THE SECOND PLACE: we should avoid the mistake of limiting the area of our historical interest
and the scope of our investigation for reasons which are largely emotional or simply irrelevant.
we cannot limit the beginning of Philippine history to the mid-19th century;
a. Shade to Teodoro Agoncillo
i. PH history started in 1872
1. GOMBURZA
a. First to articulate Filipino national consciousness
ii. We have to go back as early as we can to see how we are
iii. we cannot limit the beginning of Philippine history to the mid-19th century;
XI. This honors the nationalism of the proponents of this limitation, but this does a disservice to
history as a discipline
a. We cannot begin to understand the Philippines as a nation without first understanding it
as a colony
i. PH = postcolonial product
ii. How come lapu and raja are “Filipinos”
XII. Much of what happened during the Revolution, and much of what is happening even today,
cannot be completely understood without reference to our past, and often to our remote past;
no arbitrary limits to the range of historical research therefore could be permitted…
XIII. 19. It is important that we ask the historians questions, but we must not tell him what answers
to give…
XIV. what must we do to extract from history the additional information that we need for a greater
understanding of our national culture?
a. First, historians must do research into the entire range of our historic past.
 b. Second, they must do this research in an objective and dispassionate spirit
i. *AGoncillo = only objective impartial (x completely objective)
XV. they show how nationalism can promote the study of history, and how history can serve the
highest purposes of nationalism