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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Collecting the People: Textualizing Epics in Philippine History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/61q8p086 Author Reilly, Brandon Joseph Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Collecting the People: Textualizing Epics in Philippine History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Brandon Joseph Reilly 2013 © Copyright by Brandon Joseph Reilly 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Collecting the People: Textualizing Epics in Philippine History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Brandon Joseph Reilly Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Michael Salman, Chair My dissertation, “Collecting the People: Textualizing Epics in Philippine History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First,” examines the study and uses of oral epics in the Philippines from the late 1500s to the present. State institutions and cultural activists uphold epics linked to the pre-colonial era as the most culturally authentic, ancient, and distinctive form of Filipino literature. These “epics” originated as oral traditions performed by culturally diverse groups. Before they could be read, they had to be written down and translated into, first, the colonial language of Spanish, and later, the national languages of English and Filipino. Beginning from the earliest Spanish colonial times, I examine the longer history of writing about, describing, summarizing, and beginning in the late nineteenth century, transcribing the diverse sorts of oral narratives that only in the twentieth century came to be called epics. I pay particular attention to how the instruments of pen, printing press, tape recorder, and video recorder, and media of preservation such as government report, published ii or unpublished colonial chronicle, scholarly textualization, coffee table book, or television show, have shaped the epics. By charting how differing sets of actors from missionaries and colonial administrators to nationalists and cultural heritage preservationists sought to make sense of them over the course of successive epochs, I am able to unsettle notions of what this seemingly stable and ancient literary genre is understood to be. I show that throughout the periods I chronicle—the early Spanish colonial (late 16th to the early 18th c.), late Spanish (19th c.), American colonial (1898-1946), early post-independence (1946 to the early 1980s), and the recent era (1970s to today)—the epic has never been represented in quite the same way nor towards unchanging ends. This is a history of changing epistemologies, institutions, disciplines, and technologies engaged in the interpretation of culture. iii The dissertation of Brandon Joseph Reilly is approved. William Marotti Jennifer A. Sharpe Michael Salman, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 iv DEDICATION This dissertation is the culmination of years of study of the Philippines that have been facilitated by the guidance of numerous individuals whose contributions to my knowledge are difficult to fully express gratitude for. My intellectual growth has benefitted immeasurably from the guidance of my thesis advisor at UCLA, Michael Salman, whose intelligence still continues to startle but never surprises me. His patience with me throughout these long years has helped pushed me to become a better scholar at every turn. I cannot imagine having completed this project were it not for his sagacious guidance. William Marotti has opened my eyes to new ways of interpreting the world that have continuing purchase on the way I see things unfold. Jenny A. Sharpe has shown me how to think like a literary critic as I pursue history. Geoffrey Robinson has invaluably helped me to think of Southeast Asia in ways not grounded in my experience of the Philippines. It is from Nenita Pambid Domingo, most particularly, that I have learned the gift of Filipino. Throughout my life I have had the love and support of my wonderful family: Robert and Marie Graff; Richard, Barbara, and Joe Reilly; Lorenzo (rest in peace) and Carminia Macapagal; Raghavji, Rambhabhen, Mahesh, Prafula, Ajay, and Manisha Sanathara. I am particularly indebted to my ate, Gayatri Sanathara, whose love and everyday concern has supplied me with many of the research materials I used for this project, among so many other things. Without Nayna Sanathara, the person who animates my every subatomic particle, nothing would be possible or worth doing. A long time ago a little boy in the Philippines had nightmares of demons he always ended up running from. One night, he decided to fight back, and defeated them. Since that victorious battle, and every one since, he has been the greatest source of inspiration, patience, v and wisdom in my life and everyone else’s whom he has encountered. Were it not for Lawrence Macapagal, I simply would not be here today. It is to Unc that this dissertation is dedicated. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: VOICES INTO TEXT…………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER ONE: EPICS IN THE EARLY SPANISH PHILIPPINES REVISITED…………………………..19 CHAPTER TWO: THE GREAT DEFENDER OF THE INDIANS: FRANCISCO IGNACIO ALZINA AND PHILIPPINE ORAL TRADITIONS………………………………………………..…55 CHAPTER THREE: THE RECUPERATIVE ARCHIVE: LATE SPANISH WRITINGS ON PHILIPPINE ORAL TRADITIONS……………….…..92 CHAPTER FOUR: PARTING THE CHORUS: AMERICAN COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGINS OF COLLECTING EPICS………………………………………….131 CHAPTER FIVE: THE GARDEN OF E. ARSENIO MANUEL……………………………………………...171 vii CHAPTER SIX: OF PERMANENCE AND PROTEANISM: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN PHILIPPINE EPICS…………………………………....202 CONCLUSION: A HAPPILY UNCERTAIN FUTURE………………………………..…254 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………..263 viii VITA brandon joseph reilly Education C.Phil. in History UCLA, 2010 MA in History UCLA, 2009 MA in History CSUF, 2006 BA in History CSUF, 2004 Representative Publications “Epics in the Early Spanish Philippines Revisited.” In Nicole Revel, ed., Songs of Memory in Islands of Southeast Asia. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Pp. 279-292. “Imaginable as Other: The Representation of Muslims in Zaide and Zaide's Philippine History and Government and Agoncillo's History of the Filipino People.” Peer reviewed. Mindanao Forum, vol. 24 no. 1. 2011: pp. 43-67. ix Recent Awards Dissertation Year Fellowship Dept. of History, UCLA 2012-2013 Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship for Filipino Center for Southeast Asian Studies, UCLA 2011-2012 Newberry Library Short-Term Research Grant Newberry Library, Chicago, IL 2011 x INTRODUCTION: VOICES INTO TEXT Orally performed narrative has been a feature of Philippine cultures since before recorded history. Its sheer ubiquity explains why westerners wrote about it from the time of their earliest encounters. Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler who accompanied Magellan during his attempted circumnavigation of the world in 1521, made substantial descriptions of the many rituals involved in “the ceremonies that those people [from Cebu] use in consecrating the swine,” which included a number of recitations directed towards the sun.1 This seems to be why Maximillianus Transylvanus, “the scholar who interviewed the survivors of the expedition on their return to Seville,”2 noted in his account, “They salute, rather than adore, the sun with certain hymns.”3 In the ensuing three plus centuries the Spanish colonizers witnessed, described, and studied innumerable performed narratives by the natives, some number of which were in fact re-stagings of traditions the Spanish brought with them from the New World or the Old. Their colonial records indicate a great deal about such narratives, for instance that they were often chanted at night, recited with a specialized vocabulary, and that they were performed for occasions as diverse as religious ceremonies, seafaring voyages, or as casual entertainment. In the late nineteenth century, when a new definition of the Filipino Self began to be imagined that linked the lowland Christian majority with the unconverted upland peoples against the colonizers, these chants, in their diverse sorts, came to be seen as the most genuine expression of who these “Filipinos” were. Because of this they needed to be transcribed in full (for the first time) and studied in published books. The 1 Antonio Pigafetta, The First Voyage Around the World: An Account of Magellan’s Expedition, ed. and trans. Theodore J. Chachey Jr. (New York: Marsilio Pub., 1995), 56-57. 2 Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 146. 3 Maximillianus Transylvanus, “De Mulviccis Insulis,” in Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, eds., The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803: Explorations by Early Navigators, Descriptions of the Islands and their Peoples, their History and Records of the Catholic Missions, as related in contemporaneous Books and Manuscripts, showing the Political, Economic, Commercial and Religious Conditions of those Islands from their earliest relations with European Nations to the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 no. 1 (Cleveland: A.H. Clark Company, 1903), 329. 1 “Father of Philippine Folklore,” as the nationalist Isabelo