By Alma Anonas-Carpio
Photos by Roy Domingo
The National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) will commence the annual celebration of National Arts Month in a few days. NCCA chairman and National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario was gracious enough to sit down with Tony & Nick and tell us the progress made by his agency in terms of its mandate as the nation’s advocate for culture and the arts.
Some years ago, the NCCA was issuing calls to all local government units, asking them to submit their lists of cultural heritage treasures to the NCCA, so the commission may compile a comprehensive list of the same on a national level—both to document and to help preserve these valuable cultural heirlooms.
Progress so far
Now, Almario said “nagkakandarapa na silang magpadala ng kani-kanilang listahan (they’re scrambling to send their lists to us).” Having such an inventory, after all, will enable the NCCA to provide government support to the LGUs for the documentation and preservation of these cultural artifacts, as well as help the LGUs make these part of their offerings to the public—both their residents and tourists to these areas.
“Maraming nang activities and projects ang nagawa para masagot ang mandate ng NCCA (Several activities and projects have been accomplished to answer the mandate of the NCCA),” Almario said. “Mas malinaw na ang programs na sinusunod (The programs we undertake are now clearer).”
“Dalawa lang naman ang sinabi kong gagawin ko para sa pagsulong pa ng gawain NCCA (I only set two tasks for myself to further push the agenda of the NCCA),” Almario explained. “Una, yung pag-transform nito para maging isang Department of Culture. Ikalawa, yung direction ng mga heritage projects, para magkaroon ng more efforts towards intangible cultural heritage (First, we would transform into a Department of Culture. Second, we will look at the direction of our heritage projects toward building more efforts towards intangible cultural heritage).”
Culture department
In seeking to elevate the commission to the level of a full
government department with presence in the Cabinet, Almario said “we’ve been
pushing for a Department of Culture for a long time. But, even within the NCCA,
there were several people who didn’t want this. First, the NCCA was a product
of the EDSA Revolution, and its structure is patterned after the spirit of
EDSA.”
“The structure involves having committees that propose what activities to
undertake, the policies of the NCCA are all part of the EDSA spirit, the spirit
of volunteerism and more participation of civil society” he explained.
Almario said that, in 2008, he and other experts in the field of culture and the arts, as well as the sciences, were asked to submit proposals for strengthening government support and action in their respective fields: “What I and my group came up with was to develop a Department of Culture.” This was a proposal that was brought to the late Senator Edgardo J. Angara, complete with public consultations. However, this proposal was shelved after Angara came under fire, with criticisms that included remarks that Angara was backing the creation of a Department of Culture so he would have some place to go when he retired. Angara, Almario said, “lost interest in the proposal because of these criticisms. This was when I was retired and not occupying any government post.”
“I’d asked Butch Dalisay to research and write a book to find out why we need a Department of Culture. We really had a lot of research done for this,” he said. “What Dalisay’s research showed was that, because there is no department, the perception was that government did not prioritize culture—there was no Cabinet representation. So there was no one proposing any culture-based policies in government on politics and the economy.”
“We believe that our political and economic policies are flawed because they are not anchored in our culture,” Almario said. “It should really be our culture that will decide what makes for good politics, for what economic policies will work best for us. Remember that culture encompasses our way of life.”
“Many of our economic and political leaders studied overseas, many in the United States, and it is in the context of those cultures that they base the decisions they make,” Almario added. “Our UP technocrats are almost all US-educated.”
“Besides that, we also believe that there must be a bigger
body to coordinate the efforts of the various government cultural agencies,” he
said. “Right now, the efforts of our cultural agencies are scattered, their
effectiveness dispersed. There is no coordination. They say the coordination
should be provided for the NCCA, but, to be honest, all the cultural agencies
are equal to one another, with none having any authority over the other.”
Under such circumstances, Almario explained, coordination is difficult where
the co-equal agencies disagree. “There is no agency with any supervisory
power,” he said. This makes it difficult to achieve cultural heritage goals
where each agency has a different approach and opinion, he noted.
Cultural solutions
“Take traffic, for example,” Almario said. “It is not simply congested roads. There are norms and mores involved here, a human element to consider—and that’s cultural at its root. Maybe if we take a cultural approach to the problem of traffic and combine that with the other approaches, we can come up with a better solution.”
“One solution I see for the traffic in Metro Manila would be to declare Manila a heritage city, so all government agencies will be taken out of Manila,” he said. “What would happen then? The traffic will ease. You will turn [the capital] into a museum. All government offices, including Malacanang, all commercial offices should go out of the city and will be relocated outside the capital.”
Since the May elections are already on the horizon, we asked
Almario about his view of the voting culture in the Philippines. Here is his
answer: “Their behavior and culture is whatever the politicians have planted in
their minds. It is not a chicken and egg question. It is not that the voters
are ignorant. It is that they are kept ignorant by the politicians who need
them to be ignorant. ‘If there is no hunger, what work would we have? If there
is no need for education, what work would be left for us?’ I heard that from a
[United Nations} adviser and I found it so striking I wrote a poem based on
that.”
The political culture in the Philippines, he added, zeroing in particularly on
politicians is one that “has no sense of history, no sense of continuity,”
according to him.
“There is a need to harmonize things under a single cultural agency,” Almario said. “There really are cultural responsibilities that no one and no single agency can undertake now: The safeguarding of cultural heritage. If there is a [historical] bridge that will be torn down, that agency can object. If there is a new bridge being built that will wreck a cultural heritage site, that agency can object. If there is a jai alai that will be torn down, then that agency can object.”
We live in an archipelago that has many diverse languages and cultural heritage of both the tangible and intangible kind and Almario is of the opinion that a single agency—a Department of Culture—is the best kind of agency equipped to harmonize and coordinate efforts to piece together and harmonize a cultural identity that will support more than just our arts: Such an agency, he believes, will ensure that Philippine culture will be part of the decision-making process for economic, political, educational, perhaps even scientific matters.
Image credits: Roy Domingo