are observed in a recent post by Vicente Rafael (link): At Rockwell Makati.. In this affluent mall, the shoppers are always much larger, taller, more portly, often lighter skinned American-English-speaking-designer-bag-toting (with a sprinkling of ex-pats, mostly white, and at times, “Chinese”), while the workers who serve and wait on them tend to be smaller, skinnier, a few shades darker, vernacular-speaking-and-uniform-wearing. For those who know Filipino blogs, shades of Mariano Renato Pacifico.

Part I: Pipol are People

Them or us?

Now certainly MRP’s polemic about rich mestizos versus poor brown-skinned, flat-nosed natives is a bit oversimplified, though in the Filipino psyche, darker may still mean “one of us”. The last article (link) also tackles why the Inglesero/kanluranin classification is also a bit oversimplified. There is of course the let’s make tusok-tusok the fishballs crowd, the Arneo accent, and the Rockwell rich people. But there are middle class people like Alan Robles, Will Villanueva, educated in English yet non-elite.

Yet still the Filipino psyche, sensitive – and vulnerable (c) Karl Garcia, still can easily be manipulated against perceived Inglesero/kanluranin oppressors. Duterte’s hitting at Mar Roxas for allegedly being a fake Wharton grad used both anti-rich and anti-English language prejudices among many. So did propaganda against Aika Robredo’s Harvard scholarship (link) with the clear goal of making people believe: yeah, VP Leni is trying to look like one of the people but she ain’t, she’s just pretending. Now none of this is new.

Saupreißn talking white

Saupreiß – Prussian pig – was what Bavarians often called Prussians who started coming as tourists in the 19th century. Bavaria, though proudly inaugurated as a new kingdom by Napoleon, had a sense of lagging behind highly industrializing Prussia. Novelist Thomas Mann has interesting female character Toni Buddenbrook, a Hamburg patrician daughter, leave Munich in bitterness after her failed marriage to a Bavarian, saying that they would prefer a black man speaking their dialect to a Northerner.

Nowadays the Bavarian accent is – according to some tabloid polls, so be careful – considered the sexiest German accent while Saxon is considered a turn-off. Is it because of the newfound confidence of a state now on the top of the pile over here? Something Filipinos are humoristically trying to find when it comes to their accent (link)? Among African-Americans, “Talking white” (link, No. 3) a term used by an individual who talks ghetto in.. response to a person who talks proper and with sense once had stigma.

Cool and uncool

Now how about a black man talking Bavarian? There are more than one would imagine. Some of them children of African-American GIs from the postwar period, speaking their mother language and nothing more. What isn’t cool are many of the Duterte trolls who seem to take pride in wrong English spelling and grammar to the point of absurdity. Even to the point of stupidity. That is the other extreme to the pretentious intellectuals who think using foreign words makes them sound smart. Like Teddy Boy Locsin (link).

The opposite of pretentiousness is being oneself, which Rafael describes this way:  What’s interesting is being at the mall as it closes. Most of the shoppers are gone. The workers are left behind to clean up. You can hear them talking loudly among themselves, laughing and joking. Casting off the mask of deference. That does have a certain coolness to it. This is the opposite of being “plastik“, it is being authentic. Mimicry, which Edgar Lores has identified as an aspect of the Philippine condition, falls.

A comment on that says (link): Bourdieu’s habitus does give way to bricolage. Interesting how Manila’s underclass appropriate these sanitized spaces to enact their own kind of aesthetics.. a Sorbonne graduate, not just anyone, but one with a top doctorate reacts like this: Ang galing pala ni Burdiyu. Pati Pilipinas ay saklaw ng kanyang kaisipan; unibersal pala mag-isip ang mga Pranses. Was the one quoting Bourdieu pretentious – or himself? At first, I also considered Edgar Lores “highfalutin”.

Part II: What we know and don’t

More than words

The core of Bourdieau’s habitus idea (link) is that the entire behavior of a person says a lot about where he comes from and has been. That includes posture and accent, plus other attitudes to life in general. The concept is strong enough to be used universally. There is a clear difference in habitus between the Lumads in Tu Pug Imatuy (link) and the “colonial Filipinos”. The light-footedness of people used to hunting in the jungle is so clear in the movie. But even the Tagalog Lieutenant and the Visayan Sergeant differ.

Those who believe everything in culture can be derived from words alone deeply underestimate how much we are primates. There are several levels to the human brain and language, especially abstraction is just the tip of the iceberg. What culture does a man of Sicilian origin who grew up in Switzerland that I know belong to? That man speaks real Swiss German – with the body language and emotionality of his forefathers. Some Munich migrants totally absorb the local body language, I have seen. Mimicry?

Mimicry is going through the motions without understanding what things are all about. One can have good manners and right conduct, yet have no real respect for anyone. What can also happen is that the idea of civility, which in a Western context is respect among equals, can be misunderstood in a hierarchical culture as subservience. Some critics of how Prof. Chua was polite to Americans with regards to the Balangiga Bells cited the GMRC lessons of “Urbana at Feliza” (link) as outdated colonial conditioning.

Induction and deduction

Would that be a deductive approach, which Popoy in TSOH often criticized as being too generalizing? Inductive approaches are slower to come to conclusions but see the white carabaos. Black swans also, to go by a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. What we don’t expect. The moment we overgeneralize, the moment we forget the context we are using our mental models for, we might miss the point completely. Yet when Popoy said my comment on “topsoil” (link) was mostly nice words, I could offer a concrete example.

The other extreme to a naive approach that denies the local context are those who see the Philippine context as uniquely unique (my own words) and for example call the ex-President of Colombia an idiot (link) for saying that a war on drugs does not work. Those who refuse to look at what worked in Portugal are the polar opposite of those who thought applying recipes from UNDP or UNESCO without thought of local context would manage everything. “Only a Filipino can understand the Philippines” is also false.

Top-down and bottom-up

Joe America for example sees the Philippines from the ground level, as he lives there. Some of the best exchanges we have had between his view and my top-down view. Natural for me to have a top-down view as a former resident – now looking outside-in. Will Villanueva once described an article I wrote as being a bit like a flight in a drone. Without the interviews of Will, which take one really close to the people he speaks to, without the accounts of Joe, I might be seeing only clouds and a few houses below.

Though of course it helps to have similar frames through which one sees the world. Otherwise you get the confusion they allegedly had at Mamasapano, with one group using Google Maps and the others real GPS coordinates. Joe’s view is clearly through Western lenses, but the occasional native term like “diskarte” (link), might be discussed. Looking at Liberal and Leftist FB groups on my webpage (link), I try to see with what lenses they look at the world, hopefully filtering out some biases which everybody has.

Not seeing the forest for the trees versus just having a helicopter view – is that the only choice one has? Don’t think so, even if a complete and perfect view of anything larger than a village is impossible. All knowledge is a good enough approximation – for now. Best limited by the purpose for which one seeks the knowledge. One purpose can be to understand the present better to be able to shape the future accordingly. Real leaders need to have this understanding. Today, Filipino leaders can’t even agree on a budget.

Part III: How we learn

Stand your ground?

Vicente Rafael (link) admits in a post just after the first one, which had a lot of shares, that his FB post is of course pretty cursory: observational, descriptive, unsystematic, less than empirical, even glib the way most FB posts are (vs. refereed journal articles, which obviously it is not). Far from definitive, it was meant to spur reflection and discussion. The Filipino 100%er idea is rather different: it is that you don’t admit any weakness, that you stand your ground even if wrong, as if discussions were Erap flicks.

In that respect, Vicente Rafael is refreshingly un-Filipino. There are no demeaning tirades against those with different opinions or similar. There is no flock of followers, which is the way typical Filipino Lodis (“idols”) appear, surrounded by “devotees”. Backing down is seen as weakness by many in Filipino culture, so someone like Vicente Rafael might not be believed, while some might believe “firm” Persida Acosta. Confirmed nice guys like Prof. Xiao Chua can be seen as “prey” in such a culture.

Flames and feuds

Joe America, a keen foreign observer of the Philippine condition, writes (link): I’ve found that this black and white positioning, “you are for me or against me”, is common in the Philippines. It is an outcome of the notion of “face” which overlays fact and reason with a quality of personal engagement that is highly defensive and often irrational. So you have clans and families fighting one another to the death and bloggers running around as little totalitarians. Chua was flamed for being “too nice” to the US re Balangiga (link).

Not that there were no feuds among European thinkers. Robert Koch and Max von Pettenkofer had a feud about disease and bacteria that made the latter drink a bouillon with cholera bacteria to prove Koch wrong (link). Now that is much braver than the bluster of many a Filipino “one hundred percenter”, as Joe America calls them. It is in fact “Skin in the Game” which is also the title of a new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Marxism and Neoliberalism were both proposed by theoreticians, not by practitioners.

Preliminary conclusion

Miguel Syjuco, though an English-speaking upper class kid, took on the risky business of helping cover the police night shift in Manila, when bodies appeared on the streets. Lumad teachers, human rights lawyers and social workers – also VP Leni – take risks. What risk do I take? The risk of being seen as silly. Some of the stuff I wrote before I would not write again today, but I don’t remove it from this blog. Why should I do that? Knowledge does not spring from a well of divine perfection. It grows out of curiosity

Irineo B. R. Salazar
München, 16 December 2018