Schedule
Nov. 27, 2024 | 2:20–3:50 PM
Room
Rm 2, Center Ballroom
Chair
Ruel V. Pagunsan
University of the Philippines Diliman
Discussant
Patricio N. Abinales
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Panel Abstract
This panel takes off from three foundational works on Mindanao and Sulu. In Muslims in the Philippines (1975), Cesar Majul exemplifies how the use of multilingual sources is critical in reconstructing a non-Hispano-centric history of Mindanao. Patricio Abinales’ Making Mindanao (2000) critically examines the prevailing historiography that focuses on Mindanao’s history of rebellion by highlighting the role of local actors and surfacing the stories from the peripheries. Early in the 1970s, Michael Mastura through his monograph, The Rulers of Maguindanao in Modern History, has argued for connecting the Mindanao Muslim history with the broader Malay-Indonesian world.
Building on the foundations laid down by these scholars, this panel brings new understandings of what we might think of as “global Mindanao” by drawing on the perspectives of environmental history, economic history, and diplomatic history. It underscores how local identities and ecologies, vernacular knowledges and indigenous histories had been enriched (or challenged) by transregional developments, global connections, and cross-cultural exchanges. Delving into the world of oysters and their local interlocutors, Anthony Medrano rethinks the waters of Mindanao and Sulu as places of ecological production and cultural heritage. Exploring the private and public stores that brought in imported goods in Mindanao, Patricia Dacudao interrogates Davao as a zone of transoceanic goods and ideas. Ariel Lopez and Tirmizy Abdullah examine a set of Jawi letters as diplomatic artifacts and local heritage. Ruel Pagunsan reexamines Mindanao’s highlands as sites of transnational science while recentering the role of the local intelligentsia in the cultivation of the region’s vernacular ecologies. The panel argues that the history and heritage of Mindanao have always been global in scope and practice. Through a range of sources, languages, and voices, the papers surface and resurface the continuities and shifts of a global Mindanao from the nineteenth century to the postcolonial era.
B2.1
The World in a Shell: Stories of Oysters and their Interlocutors across Sulu and Mindanao, 1890s–1930s
Anthony D. Medrano
Yale-NUS College and National University of Singapore
This paper thinks with a history of oysters to show how, and explain why, these organisms and their interlocutors were central to shaping the economic life of Sulu and Mindanao in the early twentieth century. It is an environmental history that opens up new directions for knowing the region’s islands, waters, cultures, flows, and ecologies in ways that are offshore and vernacular, biological and braided. In doing so, the paper recovers a story (and archive) of pearls, shells, and beds as well as a network of Okinawan divers, Samal swimmers, Chinese merchants, Filipino scientists, and Tausug-, Japanese-, Lebanese-, German-, and Arab-owned luggers. As method, it experiments with human oyster interactions for what these interactions reveal about a world at sea and in motion, and for what they complicate in terms of how Sulu and Mindanao have been made intelligible in Philippine studies. Building on the interventions of Transfiguring Mindanao (2022), the paper uses a history of oysters to push back against Manila-centric views and nation-bound narratives, and the ways in which these views and narratives have narrowly mapped this transregional world in cultural, spatial, economic, and historical terms. By linking the lives and itineraries of Boon Liat, Juan Awad, and Salim Abubakar to those of Florencio Talavera, Dayang Dayang Piandao, and Sultan Hadji Kiram, it centers the workings of a “Sulu zone” anchored in the economic life of oysters rather than the “economic importance of violence” (Sidel 2003, 356). To which, the paper argues that the seas of Sulu and Mindanao served not only as corridors of violence and criminality, but also, and more importantly, as places of heritage and production—where identities, knowledges, and struggles were forged and refashioned in the early twentieth century. As places of heritage and production, these biodiverse waters continue to shape the global life of Sulu and Mindanao well into the present.
B2.2
Delivering the World to Davao: Public and Private Enterprises in Mindanao and the Circulation of Material Culture on an Abaca Frontier, 1898–1941
Patricia Irene Dacudao
Ateneo de Manila University
Davao’s location as a contact zone for the circulation of transoceanic goods, culture and ideas intensified during the American colonial era, especially with the advent of an abaca industry that involved peoples of various nationalities. Both government and private enterprises sought to provide material goods on a frontier that evoked Hamalainen and Johnson’s (2012) notion of contact zones where no single group dominated, not even the state. Consequently, cultural exchanges through material objects transfigured frontier life through adaptation and appropriation by consumers who borrowed freely (Burke 2009).
The exchange of material objects, as experienced by transplanted settlers and indigenous individuals, took place without the use of outright force. Hence, commercial exchange as a sociocultural experience was not underpinned by the potency of political structures, but rather, by more neutral cultural factors embedded in the fabric of the economy and society. The absence of stark coercion meant choice was a major factor in these exchanges. Utilizing foreign goods or adopting foreign practices were done out of necessity, convenience, and a personal quest for betterment on an evolving frontier, and not by fiat alone. Hence, the various commercial establishments on the frontier needed to adapt and cater to the tastes of their customers, as Davao inhabitants liberally made aspects of the various objects and cultures they encountered into their own.
This paper explores the development and transformations of public and private stores that brought imported goods to Mindanao and to Davao in the first half of the twentieth century. This paper likewise highlights the cross-cultural exchanges and consumption of intercontinental objects by multinational, multiethnic and multicultural inhabitants that resulted in a hybrid and cosmopolitan way of life on a Philippine frontier.
B2.3
Authority and Autonomy: Surat Jawi from Sulu and Mindanao at the National Archives of the Philippines
Ariel Lopez, University of the Philippines Diliman
Tirmizy Abdullah, Mindanao State University
This paper provides critical translation, historical contextualization and analysis of selected letters in Jawi (Arabic script) written between 1800–1898 and stored at the National Archives of the Philippines (NAP). The works of Samuel K. Tan have primarily shed light on the continued use of Surat Jawi in Sulu during the American period of Philippine history (Tan, 2005). More recently, Isaac Donoso has provided a general classification and description of some letters found at the NAP (Donoso, 2023). However, many of the Jawi letters at NAP remain unread and understudied. This paper intends to understand how Muslim polities in Sulu and Mindanao asserted and negotiated authority and autonomy vis-a-vis the Spanish colonial government in the 19th century. It asks: to what extent did colonial expansion influence the Jawi-writing tradition in Mindanao and Sulu? In which contexts was Jawi preferred over Latin script? Were there recognizable differences in scripts and linguistic patterns in different parts of the region (e.g., Sulu vis-à-vis Lanao or Maguindanao)? By doing so, this paper highlights the rich Jawi-writing tradition and heritage of the Bangsamoro that connects it to the broader Malay-Indonesian world.
B2.4
Transnational Highlands: Forests, Species and the Archiving of Mindanao Vernacular Ecologies, 1899–1950s
Ruel V. Pagunsan
University of the Philippines Diliman
The highlands of Mindanao had drawn several scientific expeditions in search for species deemed new to science. The collecting expeditions had not only resulted in the discovery of knowledge essential to biological sciences but also produced an information archive crucial in assessing and understanding the conditions of forests and animal species in the Philippines today. Moreover, the scientific explorations offer a window in which to see Mindanao as a place of “international” environmental history. The mountains of Apo and Malindang became spaces for scientific collaboration and exchanges across national lines.
This paper interrogates the biological investigations that targeted the Mindanao mountains during the periods of revolutions and transitions. It investigates the international institutions that endowed the biological expeditions, and links them with local intelligentsia who facilitated the data collection on the ground. The intellectual genealogy of Mindanao highlands has benefited from Filipino collectors and scientists such as Gregorio E. Edaño, Dioscoro Rabor and Rodolfo Gonzales. Moreover, the paper also centers the natural history participation of indigenous groups, especially the Bagobo and Mandaya, and the cultural connections of local settlers with the mountains. The highlands had become the transnational spaces that have allowed the archiving of Mindanao’s forests and species as well as the vernacular ties of the people with the mountain’s ecologies.