The First Great Filipino. The Filipino Artist. And the Filipino Art. Make it: The Portrait of the Artist as a Filipino. The Philippine Cinema. Aha, the National Artist. The list of illusory labels goes on forever. Each item in the list buffeted not by facts but by assertion, not as end goals but really as starting points for discussion, meditation, and questioning.
The search for National Artist will soon begin. Whoever is anointed by a group of individuals, tiered as in belonging to level of disputation and decision; tired as in being there in a committee for a long time.
Those who will anoint or certify—canonize is also a nice option—the artists considered for that august label belong to, it is assumed, a nation. Where can we find that nation is, however, not clear, and one of the issues not settled and unsettling. But we assume, for the sake of the selection, that there is indeed a nation. It may be more greatly articulated in the center—in Manila—where most critics and intellectuals concerned with artistry reside and that is that.
No one questions the selection. No one asks the artist of the nation what nation s/he does represent. Putative, the nation or, at least, its construct is a given. And no one realizes that it is not the nation that selects the artist to represent it, but a group of select individuals. If this is sampling in research, we have what is called “judgmental sampling.” Someone decides that this person and other persons are the ones capable of standing for a nation, not as a symbol, mind you, but as that person whose keen artistry and skill have enriched the fabric of aesthetics by “his significant contributions to the development of the country’s art.”
Interestingly, there is nothing about culture and national identity mentioned in the field of national artistry.
The problem with any notion of nation is no more an empirical validation of empire-building but the actual practice of nation-building. On what foundation shall our nation stand? On what art forms can we develop and for what end?
The fact of the matter is “nation” and “nationalism” are overrated. With those concepts are the other concept of race and person, sex and gender.
What does a nation give an individual? An identity? For what? Do I become more Filipino when a national artist is identified? What does it mean to be Filipino?
The real truth to identities is the truth that we accept them and invent the truths around them.
Charles King has a book that seems to answer my anxieties about the overblown reputation of the “national” and the eager, urging concept of a national identity or character. Entitled Gods of the Upper Air. On the cover, a subtitle says: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.
The book chronicles the life of Franz Boas and the other anthropologists who called themselves “cultural anthropologists” and their theory of cultural relativity.
Before Boas, there was an assumption that our society makes sense and the others do not. According to King, “the belief that our ways are the only commonsensical, moral ones has a powerful allure, especially when expressed in the language of science, rationality, religion or tradition.”
When Boas and his team developed these concepts, they were travelling to distant places, “to the ends of the world.” And yet, for King, this predilection for so-called exotic and strange places have another meaning, that “in order to live intelligently in the world, we should view the lives of others through an empathetic lens. We ought to suspend judgment about other ways of seeing social reality until we really understand them, and in turn we should look at our own society with the same dispassion and skepticism with which we study far-flung peoples.”
The then new discipline was really asking for self-criticism or to nurture the ability to be critical about one’s community or sense of nation.
The totalizing nation must be examined once more. Following King, we should rethink our thinking of concepts such as race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality and many other concepts. People’s understanding of them have changed through the years.
King cites as an example the 2000 census in America where, for the first time, Americans were allowed to report multiple answers to questions about their racial or ethnic identity.
In the island-province of Masbate, a group has been formed called “Arte Masbate.” While it seeks to present the artists of that province in Bicol, it also demands to know its identity. Straddling the area that is flanked by Samar and Sorsogon, the question is geographic, linguistic, and political. But it is a question whose provenance is in the manner by which the mainland and its stronger provinces of Albay and Camarines Sur continue to peripheralize Masbate.
Masbate linguistically is closer to Waray and Hiligaynon. This is the general perception of those from the island. Ticao Island, on the one hand, reserves the label “isla” and, thus, by reverse ideological snobbery, becomes not part of the mainland.
The greater loss with all these denials and disputes is to mainland Bicol whose representations have been limited to the personalities and artists of Camarines Sur and Albay. With excellent writers from Masbate and the other island-province of Catanduanes, what to make now of the renaissance of Bikol literature?
Speaking about Boas and his practice, King speaks of how the “deepest science of humanity…was not one that taught us what was rooted and unchangeable about human nature. Rather, it was the one that revealed the wide variation in human societies—the immense and diverse vocabulary of propriety, customs, morals, and rectitude.”
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano