Last October 21, 2022, I had the privilege of delivering the keynote speech for the conference organized by the Philippine Cultural Education Program (PCEP), titled “Re-Thinking and Re-Imagining Philippine Culture-based Education: Critical Engagement, Affective Investment, Decolonial Practice.”For the event, I was given the task to talk on this subject matter: “Teaching Human Rights Through the Arts: A Creative- Critical Culture-Based Pedagogy. Following hereunder is an abridged version of the speech.
Do cultures reflect the notions and actions of human rights?
That question is old, outdated, incomplete; instead, we should focus on these points of examination: Do cultures subvert human rights? Do cultures negate human rights? Do cultures affirm human rights? Do cultures work against human rights?
We can popularize our inquest and ask, “Are Philippine cultures friendly to human rights?”
The point in all this is not to fall into the trap of one-to-one correspondence, where we say: here is culture and there is human right. Now, let us find the relationship between the two.
Now to the more interesting aspect of this session, the definition of culture per se. Culture is an anthropological enterprise.
Going through the modules on cultural education, there seems to be one definition that best answers the spirit of the said kind of education. This is E.B. Tylor’s classic definition of culture, the one that says: Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
The definition is ancient, taken as it is from the English anthropologist’s book, Primitive Culture, written in 1871. It is a definition that is wholly characterized by a culture (singular) that is evolutionary and yet static. In that book, society is pictured as a totality, which cannot correspond to a real society, where conflicts are not only natural but needed to generate a dynamism for growth and identity.
Let me refer you to a book I have read: Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air. How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.
The book is compelling and entertaining, because, as cultural educators would discover, the study of cultures is compelling and fun. Charles King writes: “On board, Sonoma, was a twenty-three year old Pennsylvanian, slight but square-built, unable to swim, given to conjunctivitis…. She had left behind a husband and a boyfriend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of a woman.” This young woman who would turn out to be everyone’s idea of an ideal anthropologist is Margaret Mead.
Charles King continues: “She could not have known it at the time, but there among the welcoming feasts and the reef fishing, on humid afternoons and in the lashing winds of a tropical storm, Mead was in the middle of a revolution. It had begun with a set of vexing questions at the heart of philosophy, religion, and the human sciences: What are the natural divisions of human society? Is morality universal? How should we treat people whose beliefs and habits are different from our own?”
At the core of the substance of human rights is equality.
Fiona Bowie in her introduction to the chapter on Sex, Gender, and the Sacred in the book, “Anthropology of Religion,” says: “The “myth of equality” in Western societies disguises the extent to which sex and gender remain key organizing principles.”
Bowie in the same chapter would say: “Women were never absent from the ethnographic record, but their lives were filtered through and interpreted by men.” How do we use ethnographies, the description of cultures, what we consider as our reliable source of information about cultures?
Will the status of women change if we also change our definition of culture? Ward Goodenough’s concept of culture can help: “Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things.” Here, we see an opportunity to attempt at decolonization.
To understand ourselves we need to see how the colonized body remembers events. We need to shake off ruins and museums, which are tombstones to dead histories.
What we need is a living appreciation of our culture, not merely the artefactual.
Consider cosmology, a domain unexplored because we always think the sacred is untouchable.
The philosopher, Freya Matthews, posits: “A cosmology serves to orient a community to its world, in the sense that it defines, for the community in question, the place of humankind in the cosmic scheme of things…who they are and where they stand in relation to the rest of creation.”
Decolonization begins as we look at the rituals around us. Why do myths preserve the dominance of men over women? Why do rituals magnify other beings as subalterns?
It is not the definitions of cultures that are at fault but the disciplines that we subject our pedagogical lens to. Ethnography as an approach is already being questioned. To describe cultures is to be dialogical, to blur the line between the observer and the observed. Culture after all is not always constructive; it can be destructive, like the cultures of poverty, the cultures of impunity, the cultures that declared women should be muted.
The task will not be easy. It is like the journey of the proverbial hero, where in the quest, he or she meets oppositions and in his return, goes through what Maurice Bloch calls “rebounding violence.” Will there be closure in this search for teaching through cultures? I doubt it. As colonized bodies, we will remain suspended between the false glory of the past and the dreamy captive, the facile imagination of a reinventing future.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano