AS the Philippine Creative Industries Act nears passage in Congress, public debate veers toward what kind of industry organization may best serve its aspirations. A closer examination shows the scope of our country’s creative industries—36 subsectors to date, ranging from the traditional to the modern such as craft industries as well as those recently profitable, global outsourcing ventures like video gaming and digital graphic design.
In addition to this wide scope, we observe that organizing a creative industry for constructing modern spaces—a city, for example—goes beyond urban limits because of shared social and cultural lineage and aspirations with surrounding provinces, municipalities, and barangays. Simply put, there exists industry linkages if not dependence and likewise, commonalities if not unity, over and above existing geographic boundaries.
Yet we divide by drawing-up boundaries as influenced by our country’s archipelagic constitution thus our multi-diverse nation? This multi-diversity with its apparent fragmentation lies central to our Filipino nation’s journey toward a more sovereign state. A “more sovereign state” that implies heightened awareness of features that unite rather than divide, which lies at the heart of building—or rebuilding, Philippine creative industries where our Filipino culture and Filipino economy meet.
Consider a traditional creative industry like weaving that is central to Baguio as Unesco Creative City of Crafts and Folk Arts. While weaving is an industry, it is a centuries-old culture spanning the whole Cordillera region where Baguio is located. The CAR or Cordillera Administrative Region comprises 75 municipalities and 1,176 barangays grouped into six provinces (Abra, Apayao, Benguet, Ifugao, Kalinga, Mountain Province) plus the autonomous, highly urbanized Baguio City as Cordillera’s regional center.
What does it mean to be a regional city center? As a Unesco Creative City since 2017, being a regional city center has meant that Baguio City recognize its social and cultural responsibilities for Cordillera’s sustainability. Particularly, social sustainability reinforcing the gains from regional autonomy finally won in 1987, and cultural sustainability ensuring continuity of the Cordillera way of life.
Intrinsic in this way of life are the woven clothes and blankets marking the distinctiveness of Cordillera tribes. Abra’s Tingguian tribe alone has 11 Itneg tribes, and Benguet where Baguio City is located, has the Kankaneys and Ibalois not to mention the Kalanguya and Karao tribes. All in all, Cordillera’s ethnic peoples number at least 40 sub-tribes or clans spread out across its six provinces. Each has its own heritage at the same time sharing in one history and culture—that is, Filipino.
And meanwhile, Baguio as regional city center performs a knowledge and political role, a source of what weaving’s future could be, and the region’s marketing and distribution center to the rest-of-the-country-and-the-world.
According to popular perception, Baguio City acts as a receptacle of its region’s creativity streaming from its surrounding provinces, municipalities, and barangays. Throbbing as a meeting place where one could pinpoint distinctive identities, it generates a melting pot instrumental in fusing traditions and pushing these cultures onto modern conceptions—something new, innovative, ahead of its time. Baguio City revitalizes the Cordillera region.
But this perception is more of an ideal. Likewise, it is food for thought when we bring it to scale to reflect on our country’s major region—for example, NCR (National Capital Region) vis-a-vis our nation state developing its creative industries anew.
Now, the fact that a city moving its region (or a national capital region moving its country) from traditional to modern generates winners and losers. But this will not be as divisive if unity prevails—a consciousness borne out of sharing in the same Filipino culture with all the work on cultivation and protection that it entails.
This work puts education and training at center stage, and it demands cooperative effort across our society’s stakeholders, most of all, those into creative industries development. For this revitalization and change toward the modern, the question is thus asked: What form of creative industry organization may best serve these aspirations?
Studies show the intrinsic worth of community-oriented industry cooperatives. Emerging from the grassroots, these cooperatives ensure social and cultural sustainability. In the context of the Cordillera region, creativity as culture manifested in weaving evolved as nurtured by communities with a collective imagination and practice traversing a common history, thus establishing a shared identity.
Creativity as culture with its history and identity gets touched by its city if it fails to grow with it. But how could it fail to grow with its city? In any case, this creativity may be maintained if not asserted, even as it changes with its newfound setting such as its organization into a creative industry.
The fact that we refer to weaving in the Philippine highlands as “Cordillera weaving” has been lived for centuries. Together with this time-tested identity, weaving as a tradition of creativity remains even as Baguio City assumed parallel development, never meeting Cordillera in some significant historical moments such as centuries of colonialism and its subsequent growth with the national capital.
Baguio City, its Cordillera region—and the entire country with its other cities and regions, confront another turning point in our Philippine history and Filipino identity. We are organizing our society, particularly, our creative industries once more through the Philippine Creative Industries Act.
And indeed, the crucial question to ask may well be on the kind of creative industry organization our people need. Increasing evidence urges sustaining our Filipino creativity both socially and culturally. Let us further study, build and promote our community-oriented industry cooperatives.
May Zuleika Salao, PhD Philippine Studies at UP Diliman, is senior faculty of Political Economy at the School of Law and Governance, University of Asia and the Pacific. As scholar of the German organization, Hanns Seidel Foundation, she is presently a visiting researcher at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Germany.