There is an online group called “Memories of Naga and Bicol,” of which I am a member. It is an interesting group in many ways. It merely requires that the members share memories pertaining to the region. No bashing is allowed; disputes and disagreements are not encouraged. I like the rules, after all memories are highly subjective and personal. For these memories to be part of the community, one must respect that sharer’s position. When it is thus your turn to share your own memories, expect the same attention and respect.
I make it sound the closed group is all in agreement with each other. Not all the time. There are oppositions but the presentation of opinions is always couched in gentility, or humor. This group is a great equivalent of a true café society, where conversations are serene and muffled and, where there is a loud laughter (an amused observation, perhaps), it is easily dissipated.
Bikolanos being contrarian in nature (the region is noted for being anti-Marcos when Manila had succumbed to the wayward political charm of the dictatorship), there is only one reason why this group has sustained a peaceful and graceful exchange of ideas—memories are always good for a community. Memories are about the past and the past is oftentimes the bearer of who our forebears or ancestors were, how our parents and grandparents acted in many situations. Memories, in other words, are not merely remembering but enumerating facets of our identities.
But, a week ago, a photo appeared as one of the posts. Dated 1899, as the caption states, the photo is described showing natives of Albay, a region in southeast Luzon.
The comments that followed the post were all amusing observations. Some did not outright deny the “Bikolanoness” of the individuals shown in the photograph. Still, many took note of the fact that the men wore their hair long, and that they were not wearing trousers—the g-strings they were wearing were hidden by the shirt they put on. One observed how they look fierce. Another talk of their dark skin, adding how they were the real Bikolanos, without the admixture of Spanish and Chinese blood. On the women, the armbands were also seen and described.
Were they Agta? Agta or Aeta is one of the ethnolinguistic and cultural communities common in the region. No one would say it, but rarely could you find lowland Bikolanos claim affinity with the Agta.
The label imprisoned the community in accepting the identity of the group in the photograph. “We,” the Bikolanos were historicized in that document. We were that in Albay, in 1899. Even if “civilization,” as we lowland Christians call the change in our person at the turn of the century, is missing in that photograph, no one would outright deny the ascribed identity of the group.
Then a member posited the notion that those people are the so-called “remontados” or “monteses,” people who refused to be Christianized and went back to the mountains to escape colonization. Ah, brave men and women then.
Happy I was with the observation, I could not fully embrace these people and who they were being claimed to be. They look proud and beautiful but, I did not feel truth in their being Bikolanos. Something about their habiliment, the long hair on the men, the women with their armbands and the middle part of the torso partly exposed.
Digital tracks, I told myself. These photos must have appeared somewhere. I looked at the markings on the material: it says California State Library. I then went back online and surfed the Internet, googling the words “1899 + Albay natives.” The results came out: the photo came from the vast and amazing collection of photographs of John Tewell. In his curating of the photos, he would always warn about how dates and identifications are never conclusive. Indeed science —anthropology, archival research, and cultural studies—is never about certainty but about the discipline of critical questioning.
I checked the same photo and below it were three comments, one of which countered the label of “Albay natives” by referring to them as “Tingguian mountain men.”
Excited, I checked about any ethnography of the Tingguian exists online. Fay-Cooper Cole, I know, is one of the early experts on this group based in what is present-day Abra. Fortunately, his pioneering work, The Tingguian. Social, Religious and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe, is available in e-book form under the Project Guttenberg. Tingguian is an exonym, a name given by an outsider. The group calls themselves Itneg and they occupied what is now the present-day Abra.
Descriptions abound: “The hair is worn long, and is parted straight down the middle…. Round bamboo hats, with low dome-shaped tops, are commonly worn [and a photo illustrates this hat]…. The woman’s hair is parted in the middle, and is combed straight down to the nape of the neck, where it is caught by strings of beads….
Like the women and men in that photo. And yet, with the tag, Albay native becomes interchangeable with any native at all. One member said that precisely, that the photo can be anything at all.
The point is, a photo and a label are all it takes to define a people. The point is we really do not have a clear notion of who we were, and are. Or, maybe we have severed our links to the past, and that our connection to it is through a kind of memory that serves us when we like the images, when the narrative suits us for the moment, or when the plot flatters us into believing an illustrious origin.
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