A war is raging online. It is not on drugs; it is neither between nations. It is about cultures. It is about boundaries—those which set apart people from other people. It is also about identities, here contested, negotiated, appropriated and, consequently commodified.
By this time, you must have known already the actors in this social drama.
The dispute has, at the center, a vlogger. With the increasing attacks against him, he is at times sidelined by the vociferous voices who seem to know more about the events leading to this controversy. Then there is the Tattoo Artist, a respected cultural citizen of an ethnolinguistic group in Northern Philippines. There are other individuals talking, airing their own sides, making known their positions and situations.
The exchanges and conversations online have ranged from the sentimental to the sensational; from the intellectually detached to the intriguingly personal, and; from the merely angry to the pathologically intrusive. The trading of barbs is limited by the spaces available when one posts a message. Even as one presents a longer manifesto-like statement, the medium is built to accommodate succinct, straight-to-the-point commentaries. Bytes win in this kind of battle.
Who benefits from all this?
As of this writing, I have yet to see anthropologists or anyone who calls himself or herself a scientist of social studies participate with passion in the online battles. Allow me to hazard an educated guess: the issue is so thick one needs more than a paragraph to make a solid point. What is being discussed online is at the core of anthropology and the other disciplines that look into cultures and society. Theories have been developed out of debates more intense than what we read presently online. Alliances—and marriages—have been ruined by the conflicts of perspectives when it comes to articulating what is culturally developed and what is naturally inherent. Schools and wealth and statuses of lecturers and experts have been generated by discussing topics, like tattoos and taboos, which, when weighed against wars and poverty, come across as flippant and inordinately mystical.
Who needs mystery indeed when the reality of hunger grips millions of people?
Which brings me to the value of this discourse brought about by a vlogger who, along with others, is also named an “influencer.” The idea of a cultural artefact—the practice and “art” of tattooing—has always been as contentious as the definitions of culture. Making sense of culture has grown from perspectives that looked at the materiality of events to those that celebrated the evolution of practices. From ideas that arts and artefacts in a society express a function—the creation of community, for example—to the more seductive construct that everything is all about symbols, and therefore with meanings that are arbitrary but at the same time grounded on the people viewing them, the concept of culture undergoes nothing short of an overhaul every year or so.
Nothing can stop people from thinking culture. Culture faces us every day. We live it. We die with and in it.
Thus, you encounter ideas where the singular form of Culture is suspect. Practitioners insist on the plural form of the concept—Cultures. The singular form is viewed as monolithic or totalizing.
It appears therefore that any discussion of cultures will always bring us to extremes. On one end, we can say a culture is so unique that it cannot be compared to other cultures; at the other end, we claim how culture can always be compared to other cultures. All these points are relevant to the tattoo artist who shares her skills and designs with the outside world and to the outsider who now wants to put a monetary value to said act of sharing.
Look at the crisis of exchange. Does the tattoo artist own that skill, which, it appears, was handed to her through generations? If and when the community agrees to the deal, to what degree can the government through the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) intervene? Is the intervention ethical?
Cultures and the practices within are non-material boundaries. As the discussions rage on, artists and cultural workers from other regions are warlike in their attempt to protect an indigenous art form, which by definition, does not belong to them. These are the same culture vultures who eternally complain about dying arts, because those art forms do not live for them.
Two problematic notions are excavated at this stage. These are the notions of indigeneity and authenticity.
We, who, by historical and cultural default, have become lowland Christians, are offended because we are losing to a foreigner what is “native” to us. But are we—Bikolanos, Tagalogs, Visayans—indigenous? When a filmmaker decides to make a film about us, there is no NCIP that will restrict any filmmaker to do that. When cultural institutions through creative costuming combine all the designs and patterns of the Manobo, Tingguian, Yakan and Kalinga textile in one clothing, is that awesomely alright? Or is that a form of stealing and exploitation? When a local artist borrows the pattern of a Japanese manga artist, does he feel the guilt of a thief or is that once more an example of a convenient lie?
There is, however, in the end, a great value in this incident. This should be a wake-up call for cultural advocates, tourism experts and anthropologists. In his book, Gods of the Upper Air. How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, Charles King writes: “Indigenous people were not just the subject of anthropological research—they were the reason for its existence.”
Many of us indeed have profited and received fat wages by the fact of some people being labelled “indigenous” and their arts marked “authentic.”
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