FIGURING CATHOLICISM BAUTISTA

AN ETHNOHISTORY OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU JULIUS J. BAUTISTA

ATENEO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is about a statue of Christ as a boy who is worshipped by millions of Filipinos from all walks of life. Today, the Santo Niño de Cebu—said to be the same wooden figure brought to the islands by Ferdinand Magellan during the very moment of his 1521 “discovery” of the Philippines—is enshrined in bullet-proof glass case in a Basilica that hosts throngs of devotees in its Friday novena.

While this study is concerned with describing the various ways the figure is revered, its aims extend beyond this. The author combines ethnography with historiography and discourse analysis to analyse how our most prevalent assumptions about the figure are produced and disseminated. What ideas have sustained such assumptions after all this time? How did the figure become such a popular “national” treasure? To what can we attribute the Santo Niño’s appeal outside the official doctrines of the Catholic faith? This book looks at historical documents, popular songs, news articles, poems, and oral accounts to address such questions. In doing so, this book describes the contours of a ‘figured’ Catholicism as the context in which we can think about the Santo Niño in ways we have not done before.

JULIUS J. BAUTISTA is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He concurrently holds a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. He is coeditor of Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict (2009). Bautista is an anthropologist with degrees from the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. He has published on religious practice in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Christian iconography, religious piety, and the relationship between religion and politics.

FIGURING CATHOLICISM: AN ETHNOHISTORY OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU

ATENEO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY PRESSBellarmine Hall, Katipunan AvenueLoyola Heights, Quezon CityP.O. Box 154, 1099 Manila, PhilippinesWebsite: www.ateneopress.org

Cover photograph by Jacob MaentzCover design by Karl Fredrick M. Castro

AN ETHNOHISTORY OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU • JULIUS J. BAUTISTA

ATENEO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY PRESS

FOR MY PARENTS

VICENTE & MARIA VICTORIA

ATENEO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY PRESSBellarmine Hall, Katipunan AvenueLoyola Heights, Quezon CityP.O. Box 154, 1099 Manila, PhilippinesTel.: (632) 426-59-84 / Fax (632) 426-59-09E-mail: unipress@admu.edu.phWebsite: www.ateneopress.org

Copyright 2010 by Ateneo de Manila University and Julius J. Bautista

Book and cover design by Karl Fredrick Castro

The author would like to acknowledge Mr. Ben Farrales, Jacob Maentz and Erlinda Alburo for giving their permission to use photographs in this book as cited.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the Publisher.

The National Library of the Philippines CIP Data

Recommended entry:

Bautista, Julius J. Figuring catholicism : an ethnohistory of the Santo Niño de Cebu / Julius J. Bautista. -- Quezon City : Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2010. p. ; cm.

ISBN 978-971-550-612-0 1. Holy Childhood, Devotion to. 2. Catholic Church--History-- Philippines. 3. Catholic Church--Doctrines--History. 4. Cebu (Philippines) --Church history. 5. Philippines--Church History.

BX2159.C4 232.927 2010 P102010703

Preface vii

A Note on Orthography x

INTRODUCTION 1

Tracing the Santo Niño’s Filipino “Figuring”

1 THE “INS” AND “OUTS” OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU 19

2 AN ARCHIPELAGO TWICE “DISCOVERED” 47

The Santo Niño in the Discourse of Discovery

3 THE ICON SURVIVES 73

The Santo Niño and the Clash of Christianities

4 THE PHILIPPINES FOR CHRIST 97

The Santo Niño de Cebu’s National Figuring

5 THE SYNCRETIC SANTO NIÑO 123

‘Folk Catholicism’ as Religious Discourse

6 THE REBELLION AND THE ICON 151

The Religious Contextualization of Popular Uprising in the Philippines

7 THE PRODIGIOUS CHILD AND BATA NGA ALLAH 179

Locating the Santo Niño in Filipino Projects of Soul-Searching

8 WHO FILIPINOS SAY CHRIST IS 207

Notes 211

Appendices 219

References 233

Index ???

CONTENTS

VII

PREFACE

This book is about Roman Catholicism in the Philippines as it is manifested in a little statue called the Santo Niño de Cebu. In writing

it, I drew upon my life experience as a Cebuano migrant to Australia who was uprooted from a childhood spent in a coastal town in Cebu, and finally transplanted as an adolescent to the western suburbs of Sydney. The motivation for this book was a sense of reflexivity about a certain identity politics. In the mid–1990s—when Australian Parliamentarian Pauline Hanson’s tirade against Asians and Aborigines was allowed by the then Howard government to percolate—those who complained about Asians who “form ghettos and do not assimilate” became emboldened to portray “mainstream Australia” as an intolerant society. Thankfully, it did not take too long for this “Hansonite” view to become refuted by Australians’ appetite for Asian life worlds, for which, among many Australian friends, I was often an immediate and initial point of contact. Being part of multicultural Australia under that political climate gave me the opportunity to reflect upon the contours of my own alterity, so that in constantly having to respond to the (usually follow-up) question of “but where are you really from?” I was able to think more concretely about what “home” actually means.

I could well have decided to direct my research towards this very issue of fragmented identity, which can itself qualify as a topic in its own right. There are not a few “heritage scholars” who have forged entire careers from writing about the turbulent experience of living as an immigrant in a land uncomfortable with, if not hostile to, otherness. What’s more, the trend towards postmodernism in the academe has

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTAVIII IxPREFACE

provided conditions conducive to the unpacking of the vicissitudes of multiplicity and plurality. Dealing with identity is a good platform from which one can channel an instinctive and nostalgic insight about home—an intuitive knowledge that is maintained by intermittent (if tenuous) connections to one’s heritage. As such, this book is a journey sustained by the dislocated migratory sensibility that runs as an undercurrent to my understanding and analysis of religion in the Philippines.

Many people have helped me along this journey, which may not have even begun were it not for my family’s encouragement and unstinting support. I dedicate this book to my parents, Vicente and Maria.

I owe a profound debt of gratitude to my principal advisor and colleague, Reynaldo C. Ileto, who was the first to encourage me to channel my raw, gut instincts towards scholarly research. Resil Mojares, with his comprehensive and intuitive knowledge of Cebu, was likewise a source of inspiration and insight. Erlinda Alburo at the Cebuano Studies Center, aside from facilitating many practical and intellectual requirements, has given me numerous opportunities to test out those instincts and gut concerns. From a greater distance, Takefumi Terada and Vicente Rafael had significantly influenced the production and shape of this book.

In Canberra, Greg Dening, Tom Griffiths, Virginia Matheson Hooker, Peter Jackson, Oscar Florez-Marquez, Donna Merwick, Anthony Reid, Mandy Thomas, and Caroline Turner have lent me their time, support, and valuable insights. My colleagues at the Faculty of Asian Studies have indulged me in discussion so that my ideas (about Cebu or otherwise) became situated within a broader intellectual universe. To Christopher Collier, Rommel Curaming, Mark Emmanuel, Deborah Johnson, Mary Kilcline, Yasuko Kobayashi, Amrita Malhi, John Monfries, Shun Ono, Jacob Ramsay, and Lorraine Salazar, I offer my thanks and best wishes. In other parts of Australia, I’d like to acknowledge the support of Ghassan Hage, Jadran Mimica, Raul Pertierra, Michael Pinches, and Yao Souchou.

Financial support for this project was made possible by an Endowment for Excellence Scholarship from the Alumni of the Australian National University, which made it possible for me to travel to conferences and research trips in the Philippines and Spain as well as around Australia. Twelve months of fieldwork in the Philippines did much to bridge the gap between the Cebu of my nostalgic imagination and the one that is a living, breathing reality. In Cebu City, I benefited

greatly from my time at the University of San Carlos where, in the Departments of History and Anthropology, I held joint teaching appointments in 2000 and 2001. I express gratitude to my colleagues and intellectual cohorts: Jovito Abellana, Rene Alburo, Jose Eleazar Bersales, Aloysius Cañete, Harold Olofson, Jojin Pascual, John Peterson, and Robert Rublico. Archival research in Madrid was more productive with the assistance of Michael Cullinane, Sean Retana, Florentino Rodao, and Jaime Veneracion. In Nuevos Ministerios, Catalina Billar deserves special mention both for her intellectual generosity and heart-warming hospitability. In Manila, I benefited from the kind assistance and friendship of Etsuko Rodriguez, Yoriko Tatsumi, and Lydia Yu-Jose.

A joint appointment at the Asia Research Institute and the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore enabled me to put the finishing touches on the manuscript. I acknowledge the support and collegiality of scholars in both these institutions, particularly Bryan S. Turner, who has encouraged me to fathom the broader reach of this book’s ideas.

Countless others have contributed to enriching this journey, none of whom should be implicated in any of my errors in fact, interpretation, or translation. Friends and family, casual and unlikely acquaintances or even chance encounters have been invaluable towards making what this work now is. I offer my heartfelt gratitude to those nameless others, those who helped me to appreciate that Cebu still resides in me, even though the reverse is no longer the case.

1

INTRODUCTION Tracing the Santo Niño’s Filipino “Figuring”

The focus of this book is a statue of Jesus Christ as a boy housed majestically in a glass-panelled shrine in Cebu City (fig. i). The Santo

Niño de Cebu is an object of devotion for millions of Filipinos, many of whom believe it to be well over four hundred years old. Every year, thousands upon thousands of people journey to attend its feast, while every day hundreds queue for as long as an hour to spend but a few silent seconds praying and reflecting in the statue’s presence.

Numerous tales of the statue’s miraculous capacity for survival encourage widespread adulation. Whether it is through the account of the burning of an Augustinian monastery in the 1600s or through the tale of the American bombardment of the Santo Niño Church in World War II, the Santo Niño’s antiquity is premised upon its outlasting both its custodians and the edifices that have housed it. It might seem unlikely that a small wooden statue would endure, among other things, the harsh natural elements and the depredations of successive colonial regimes. Yet the Santo Niño is today accorded the same degree of reverence as a priceless national treasure or an irreplaceable historical artifact. A scientific dating of the figure’s age—a detail left out of virtually all accounts of its provenance—seems less important when one inquires into the reasons for its popular appeal. What most Filipinos agree upon is that the Santo Niño, or the Niño for short, stands as a tangible representation of Filipinos’ Catholic identity, such that its survival is itself a metaphor for how the faithful have fared amidst the many tribulations in their tumultuous history.

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA2 3INTRODUCTION

What compels such widespread devotion to this particular diminutive statue? What kinds of ideas underpin the prevailing belief in its importance, even though the explanations of its origins might seem improbable? What does this devotion show about the nature of Catholicism in the Philippines, then and now? This is a study in which the Santo Niño is used as an entry point into describing what it means to be Catholic in the largest Christian nation in Asia today. In studying the figure I am, in fact, challenging long-held theoretical and theological inclinations, citing discursive trends and deconstructing stories about Filipino religious belief and practice. What I seek to do in this book is to understand how icons have provided for Filipinos a means of negotiating the various social, political, and even economic challenges that beset them. In this way, I argue that icons like the Santo Niño manifest, in ways that find expressions in areas outside of Cebu, a “figured” Catholicism both in a literal and metaphorical sense.

By “figuring Catholicism” I mean two things specifically: first, I refer to the statue that can be understood as an ethnographical subject. As a tangible thing, the “stuff” of the Santo Niño carries enormous significance in Filipino worship and religiosity. Every inch of the figure’s physicality—from the contours of its face, to the numerous vestments it wears, to the podium on which it stands—denotes something specific about the Filipino devotion to it. In this sense, the Santo Niño figures in Filipino life worlds when the statue is appealed or, prayed to, invoked, or reflected upon as part of Filipino religious belief. The Santo Niño figures in Filipino sensibility when its replicas are displayed in people’s homes, given as presents for good tidings, or kept as valuable heirlooms passed down the generations. I describe this kind of figuring most prominently in the first chapter.

In the second sense, figuring refers to the Santo Niño that can be understood as subject of religious discourse. This is to ask how the image is imagined as metaphorically, sentimentally, and discursively entwined in Filipino understandings of their own faith. The involvement of the figure in the most momentous events in Philippine history—something that is seen as providential and divinely inspired by Filipinos of all walks of life—is something that sets the Santo Niño apart from any other religious statue in the nation. When I ask in chapter 2, for example, how the Santo Niño figures in the remembrance of the event of Cebuano conversion to Christianity, I argue that the remembrance of religious upheaval is mediated through certain stories (some apocryphal, others

historical) of the figure’s “double discovery.” Similarly, in chapter 7, where I ask how the Santo Niño figures in Filipino attempts to foster a civilizational identity, I endeavor to explain how the icon contextualizes Filipino thought and action through the localized rendition of its origins.

These two heuristic strategies manifest my own desire to understand how and why the Santo Niño figures so prominently in Filipino religious life. The underlying rationale is the movement back and forth between figuring as a tangible, solid thing in the practice of Catholicism; and figuring as the ways in which an ensemble of ideas about the Santo Niño recur repeatedly in the cultural and historical potraits people paint of and for themselves.

Very few religious icons in the Philippines are as widely worshipped and sentimentally revered in quite the same way as the Santo Niño de Cebu—the “original” among many Christ Child statues in the country. Many articles, reviews, reports, and personal testimonies attest to the icon’s place in the hearts and minds of the Filipino people. There are many prevailing ideas about the icon that, because they have existed “since time immemorial,” have not been contested or even questioned. By discussing, in the chapters that follow, the conditions in which those ideas are produced and circulated, I intend simply to make people think about the Santo Niño in ways that they have not done before.

POWER, DISCOURSE, AND THE SANTO NIÑO AS SYMBOL The figuring of Catholicism as a scholarly project finds reverberation in the disciplines of anthropology and history. I agree with Maurice Bloch (1987, 6) who said that it is “in the rapprochement between anthropology and history that the really exciting things seem to be happening” (cf. Ortner 1989, 16). Similarly, Greg Dening (1980, 1988) and the “Melbourne School” of historians have been pioneers in this intersubjective convergence between history and anthropology. While this work is decidedly historical in breadth, looking at the ways in which the Santo Niño is embedded in reflections and recollections of the Cebuano past, it is also anthropological in placing methodological primacy in prolonged periods of fieldwork and linguistic proficiency.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, 91–94), who focused on Southeast Asian life worlds in Bali, had famously defined religious symbols as “tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs.” This study, similarly, conceives

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA4 5INTRODUCTION

of symbol as the objectification of ideas in religious iconography and statues. We shall see, particularly in the first chapter, how the Santo Niño figures as the physical embodiment of Filipino attitudes about things beyond their immediate experience. Inscribed in the figure’s miniatureness—in the sheer compactness of its physique—is an anthropomorphosis of religious sensibility; a “deep play” of Filipino Catholicism manifested in the corporeal likeness of Christ.

Yet as much as symbols are constituted by human thoughts and attitudes, they are also constitutive of how people perceive, think, and act upon their world. Geertz (96) defines symbols as “models,” or templates, from which are induced religious “moods and motivations” that, in turn, influence how humans negotiate the contradictions of their experiences. In this regard, as Pierre Bourdieu argues (1977, 71), symbols are intertwined with people’s “dispositions” such that they are also the basis for ongoing processes of structuring experience (a dynamic Bourdieu calls “structuration”). Chapters 2 and 5 describe how the Santo Niño framed and conditioned Filipino attitudes and responses during events of momentous social and political upheaval. The “doubleness” of Geertz’s formulation—that symbols are both models of and models for a peoples’ reality—underlies the importance of icons like the Santo Niño in the practice and propagation of religion, particularly where its adherents are challenged and in crisis. This process underlies the second kind of figuring of Catholicism that I speak of here.

In the examination of the Christian Philippines, however, I seek to expand upon the theoretical implications of Geertz’s ideas. Does the Santo Niño as a model of the social world simply reflect the affective sensibilities of the Catholic faithful? Conversely, will it, as a model for their world, always order and regulate Filipino perceptions of reality immediately and automatically? Geertz’s dialectic formulation suggests that symbols operate upon certain mental processes intrinsic and specific to humans. Characteristic of American cultural anthropology’s focus on “meaning,” Geertz’s influence encourages us to focus analytical attention on processes of cognitive stimulus—on how people interpret symbols. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, however, the transcendent physicality of the Santo Niño itself is critical to its potency. In this book I focus on the material and the tangible aspects of the figure, and not just upon the cognitive, the symbolic, and the semiotic.

There is a danger in assuming that the Santo Niño has only one consistent meaning among Filipinos. There is also a danger in thinking

that there is only one group of people who have a more legitimate interpretation of the meanings of the Santo Niño than others. A major objective of this study, as such, is to argue that there is often an incongruity between the Santo Niño’s official or doctrinal meanings on the one hand; and how ordinary people actually regard it in everyday practice on the other. That is, there is often a lack of fit in religious devotion that reveals the agency of a group of people in interpreting icons in ways that sit awkwardly with the intentions that foregrounded its production. Filipino historians such as Ileto (1979) and Rafael (1988) and anthropologists such as Alejo (2001) showed that religion in the Philippines is often characterized by slippages between intention and interpretation, thereby drawing attention to the creative (and reactive) strategies upon which Filipinos made use of Christian icons and doctrine. Following on from their work, I look beyond the Geertzian notion of symbol, focusing also on discursive processes of resistance, intervention, suppression, or naturalization of ideas. In other words, the focus is not merely on the Geertzian symbol as such, but also on those historical relations of power upon which ideas about figures like the Santo Niño are produced and construed.

It is important at this stage to discuss how “power” corresponds to the scholarly project of figuring Catholicism. Another anthropologist, Talal Asad, raises important issues in inquiring into the specific conditions under which religious symbols can produce religious dispositions. Reflecting specifically upon Geertz’s views on religion, Asad (1993, 35) problematizes the exclusive primacy of symbols in determining the range and scope of human thought and agency: “It is not mere symbols that implant true [Christian] dispositions,” he argues, “but power ranging all the way from laws and other sanctions . . . to the disciplinary activities of social institutions and of human bodies.” Asad’s conception of power echoes that of Foucault (1979, 202) who located the principle of power “in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes, in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.” For both Asad and Foucault, power exists in “disindividualized” form; as a repressive and constitutive force exerted not just through symbols and actors, but in diversified institutional structures such as prisons (colonial), governments, or indeed in the Church itself.

In this study, Geertz’s concept of symbol is brought to bear on relations of power in the poststructuralist sense. It also brings to bear

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA6 7INTRODUCTION

the concept of “symbol” on the everyday practical (and in many ways contradictory) experience of Catholicism in the Philippines today. All of the chapters of this book focus on the genealogies of “regimes of truth” upon which Filipino moods and motivations concerning the Santo Niño are defined and mediated. Figuring Catholicism, I argue, is not merely about analysing the Santo Niño as a symbol driven exclusively by an essentially cognitive dynamic; as though autonomous from the discursive epistemes that Foucault describes. The chapters that follow are formulated upon the notion that the meanings of symbols are not automatically generated in a cultural ontology but, rather, can be traced to “conventional projects, occasional intentions, ‘naturalized’ events, and so on” (Asad 1993, 13).

Indeed, it is productive to describe the nature and history of Filipino devotion to the Santo Niño. What I seek to do in this book, however, is go beyond that by asking why certain ideas about the Santo Niño are more accepted than others. What are those historical, political, and cultural circumstances in which some versions of the Santo Niño’s story are considered more dominant, more official than others, thereby facilitating their transmission among Filipinos across time and space?

Asking these kinds of questions entails an examination of power, and invites us to elaborate on how discourses are formed or promulgated in the context of Filipino Catholicism. “Discourse” typically refers to speeches and the performative act of articulating ideas. By discourse, however, I am referring to the systematic interconnection of a wide corpus of statements, so that a discussion of a “discourse of discovery” or a “discourse of syncretism” refers to an interrelated ensemble of thinking about the Santo Niño over time. Discourse is the site in which power is exerted upon knowledge, so that certain claims about the Santo Niño have become naturalized as truths. The validity of certain values about the Santo Niño may not be divinely sanctioned or inherent in a miraculous grace, but often results from intentional technologies of promotion, inculcation, or sanitization. This is a theme that runs through all the chapters. The vital point about discourse as it is used in this study is that it demonstrates how objects of (religious) knowledge are produced and disseminated in accordance with specific institutional agendas. In other words, there are traceable processes that determine how the Santo Niño can be meaningfully talked and reasoned about, and influence how agendas are enacted through devotional practice in order to regulate the conduct of its participants.

These chapters are concerned primarily with those discourses whose genealogy can be traced to Spanish and American colonialism as the original purveyor of religious truths. It is not my intention, however, to argue that all knowledge about the Santo Niño is simply contingent upon colonial agency. The chapters that follow concern not merely the discussion of those dominant discourses inspired by the convergence of missionization and imperialism, but also the ways in which Filipinos sought to subvert their primacy in the crafting of their own counter-discourses. In the performance of “folk religiosity” such as those I discuss in chapters 1 and 5, these attempts at subversion themselves are the conditions of possibility of new regimes of truth. As such, the task here is not just to engage in a discursive comparison of texts and claims, but also to ask how competing discourses are constitutive of other regimes, paying specific attention to the motivations of the agents who use and deploy them.

This study, then, describes the Santo Niño beyond its purely phenomenological manifestations. It discusses iconography as a set of relationships between objects and events, whereupon discursive power creates religious “truth.” This is a study about those intentional processes in which religious icons are co-opted in designating experiences as “religious,” “holy,” “divine,” or “sacred.” What, for example, are the discursive conditions in which the Santo Niño is widely believed to be over four hundred years old? What are the regimes of truth that underpin the popular conviction in its “miraculous” powers of survival? This work addresses such questions by being attentive to relations of power and discourse, thereby going beyond a scientific or statistical evaluation of the Santo Niño’s provenance, or a conventional ethnography of the practices of its devotees.

THE EPIC AND THE EPISODICThe structure of this book reveals the extent to which figuring Catholicism also has an important historical component. “An historical situation,” writes Stephen Greenblatt (1993, x), “is never simply that of the moment: it is the expression of long-term trajectories, material necessities, social structures, enduring, largely unconscious patterns of will and constraint, not necessarily identical with the culture’s own understanding of itself or others.”

This work traces over four hundred years in the history of the Santo Niño, moving strategically back and forth across time and event.

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA8 9INTRODUCTION

As Greenblatt suggests, the general aim is to depict the Santo Niño’s “historical situation” by locating cross-temporal and cross-cultural patterns of recalcitrance and appropriation, pragmatic acts that subvert even people’s self perceptions. As such, the chapters of this book are not meant to follow a pre-given chronology. They are structured, rather, to challenge the deterministic causality of progress and development—something that can be approached by juxtaposing significant events of the Santo Niño’s history, taking heed of the sometimes ironic relationship between them. The chapters that follow, each evoking specific issues or events, are united by the Santo Niño as both a topic of research and as a heuristic anchor.

In this respect, this book is different in scope and methodology from other works on the Santo Niño. The works of Tenazas (1965) and Florendo (2001), if only for the breadth and depth of their inquiries, stand out as the most popular among an assortment of essays, coffee table books, and commemorative albums about the Santo Niño. A prevalent characteristic of these works is the “epic” and lineal rendition of the Santo Niño’s history, in which it is depicted as having emerged from the fires of a Golden (European) Age, and brought to different corners of the globe by the emissaries of the Christian faith. Upon this act, the figure is shown to have been seamlessly implanted into various local cultures, framing the universal acceptability of the Christian doctrine it symbolizes. Its European lineage notwithstanding (it is usually identified as of Flemish origin) this conventional history of the Santo Niño posits the Philippines as the home ground in the figure’s literal and symbolic journey. From the Santo Niño’s arrival in Cebu, to its numerous feats of survival, to the adoption of its devotion across the rest of the archipelago, a more or less predictable narrativity recounts the nation’s progression from the paganistic and profane (the Dark Age), to the “spiritual” and “sacred” (the onset of a kind of Filipino Enlightenment).

In this sense, a wide array of Santo Niño literature can be situated within a tendency in postwar Philippine historiography to examine religious change within the template of the causal and the linear. As Ileto (1997, 99) has observed:

The operations by which some events are highlighted while others are suppressed, the division into arbitrary historical periods, the establishment of chains of cause and effect, the

evolutionary ordering of phenomena such as from primitive to advanced, religious to secular—all these are obscured in textbooks and teaching methods. The student is made to learn the facts as they are strung out in some linear fashion, not the relationship of histories to power groups, the silences of the past, or the history of the linear scheme itself.

In elucidating his prescriptions for a “nonlinear emplotment of Philippine history,” Ileto demonstrates how some eminent Filipino historians have forsaken an attentiveness to the construction of knowledge in favor of fostering the “epic” of Filipino religious history. Most works on the Santo Niño are particularly susceptible to a grandiose historiographical lineality, given that the figure is conceived of as a kind of trans-temporal, heroic relic of the Filipino past.

It is upon a dissatisfaction with such modes of metahistory that this book has been conceived.1 This is a project that displaces the primacy of the epic by engaging in the “thick description” of the various events of Filipino engagement with the Santo Niño.2 It proceeds upon the anthropological notion that sees constructions of cultural reality as compressed and expandable. In practice, this means engaging in the analysis of synchronic clusters of historical minutiae—historical events, episodes, or anecdotes—which, when “unpacked,” reveal the complex social fields within which they operate.

I am not proposing an analysis of the elements of myth or narrative in a Levi-Straussian sense. Rather, this is an act of using the event as a heuristic device towards understanding how ideas about the Santo Niño have gained institutional sanction (from the Roman Catholic Church, for example) and general acceptance among people at large. The second chapter, for example, examines the event of mass baptism during which the Santo Niño was first “bequeathed” unto Cebuanos in 1521. The analysis of this episode enables us to gain insight into the specific constructedness of the connection between “discovery” and “salvation”—continuities that pervade even modern Filipino understandings of baptism and conversion. Figured, as these concepts are, in the image of the Santo Niño, the question we ask by focusing on the event is what imbues the conception of the event of the first native baptism with an aura of “salvation” or “sense of destiny”? It is not upon the emplotment of history into a deterministic chain of causality that this question can be addressed. It is, I argue, in being cognizant of the

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA10 11INTRODUCTION

discursive density of events (to its thickness) that the genealogical study of the Santo Niño’s contemporary meanings can be engaged.

This attentiveness to the hermeneutic potential of the episode is a prevalent characteristic of Vicente Rafael’s work (2000, 2006). For him (2000, 4), the usefulness of an “episodic history” “lies in its ability to attend to the play of contradictions and the moments of non-heroic hesitation, thereby dwelling on the tenuous, we might say, ironic constitution of Philippine history.” Linear history’s alignment towards tropes of progress and development hampers our understanding of instances of silence or recalcitrance that do not easily fit into larger metanarrative structures. For Rafael, it is by drawing out the ironic relationship between the historical epic and moments of passive resistance or creative sedition that one is able to truly appreciate the richness the archives have to offer.3

In the same vein, this study transcends metahistory’s inhibitive structures by setting one historical episode against another in order to flesh out the ironies manifested therein. Hence, the “heroic” event of the Santo Niño’s discovery in the sixteenth century stands in ironic disparity to the 2003 event of its “demotion” as patron saint. Similarly, the tales of the Santo Niño’s survival stand in stark and ironic contrast to the event of a hundred of its replicas being dumped in a Cebuano garbage heap in 2003. This study concurs with Rafael’s conviction that “[i]rony forestalls and interrupts the establishment of a single, overarching narrative about the nation” (ibid.). For it is upon allowing for the emergence of irony in our work that history can be fostered as a dialogical praxis: as a dialogue within the past (wherein each historical episode is characterized by a conflict of voices), and a dialogue with the past (where synchronic events are juxtaposed with each other to account for either continuity or change).

This use of synchronic historical events as a specific methodology has not been without criticism. Rafael’s “episodic history” has been interpreted as promoting a haphazard voluntarism of interpretation that opens up a kind of authorial arbitrariness. For in the choosing of which episodes are to be mined for their interpretive and ironic significance, is not the author himself in danger of imposing his own sense of value upon historical categories? It is not immediately clear whether an episodic history offers a method beyond what Hunt (1991, 97) has described as “individual virtuosity in which history is simply a storehouse of interesting anecdotes available to an exceptionally talented

writer.” Furthermore, while Rafael’s approach might imply that episodes are chosen randomly and that others would be just as likely to furnish us with insight, some episodes seem far more condensed than others (that is, some texts seem “thicker” than others) as Greenblatt has suggested (1997, 17). How does one decide which episodes are to be singled out for thick description, considering that the act of choosing is itself subject to various authorial strategies and agendas? Among the plethora of episodes in history, are the ones chosen for analysis contingent solely upon the author’s predilections? As Dirlik (2001) suggests, it seems that there is a need for episodic history to be combined with careful consideration of how the historian deals with issues of the interpretive significance and value of each event.

In response to these, I argue that episodic history must be an anchored project, one that specifies the linkages between the synchronic events chosen for analysis. That is, the events chosen for analysis in an episodic history should all be associated with a tangible object around which events and discourses circulate. In this study, therefore, the Santo Niño is not merely the topic of discussion, but also the heuristic object by which episodes and discourses are unpacked and examined. It is the binding constant throughout the book that connects the events chosen for analysis. In chapter 5, for example, the analysis of the discourse of syncretism is anchored on the event of the Santo Niño’s controversial effective demotion from patron to sainthood. The main feature of episodic history is in its furnishing insights about syncretism that would otherwise have been impossible if not seen in the context of the Santo Niño’s contentious relegation. A focus on the event of this demotion reveals a syncretism characterized by a politics of institutional regulation over the definition of the Santo Niño’s sainthood or divinity. Again, the irony of the event of demotion (juxtaposed as it is within a long period of the Santo Niño’s symbolic dominance) imbues interpretation with a depth absent from a deterministic epic history.

This historical anchoring I advocate here already finds expression in Filipino cultural history. The potential arbitrariness of choosing episodes for analysis is tempered with the Santo Niño as an analytical bedrock upon which investigation can be deployed. I am not the first to employ such an approach. In explaining why he chose to ground his genealogy of modern Filipino knowledge on the lives of three pioneering intellectuals, for example, Mojares (2006, ix–x) identifies the need for “a specific, historicized cultural site from which one can look out into the

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA12 13INTRODUCTION

world. Even as one must acknowledge that it is a position neither pure nor unassailable, it is ground under one’s feet, mooring and haven in which one can orient oneself in relation to the territory covered or yet to be traversed.” In this book, which can be described as an episodic history and ethnography of Filipino Catholicism, the Santo Niño is that heuristic mooring from where explorations into the temporal and cultural vistas of Filipino Catholics can be engaged in a measured and productive way.

ALTERNATIVE DISCOURSE AND FIELDWORK “AT HOME”Although many of the observations made about Cebu City in this book find parallels in the outlying regions of Cebu Province, ethnographic research was conducted mainly in the urban setting of Metro Cebu where fieldwork was undertaken for a period of eleven months. Cebu is an island with a land area of 508,844 ha located in the central part of the Philippine archipelago. The province has a population of 3.86 million people (2007 Census), over 85 percent of whom are Roman Catholic. Cebu City, the capital of the province, is a metropolis populated by around 799,762 people.

Though the location of this work is clear, I find it slightly discomforting to talk about fieldwork in the conventionally anthropological sense of participant observation, particularly as it was conceived by the pioneers of British social anthropology. “Fieldwork” suggests periods of displacement from the ethnographer’s comfort zone (that is, her or his “home”) for the sake of prolonged and coeval exposure to the life worlds of those she or he is studying. It implies the ethnographer’s engagement with “informants” who act typically to assuage the anthropologist’s linguistic and logistic vicissitudes. There is a sense, furthermore, that fieldwork is some kind of rite of passage, the completion of which signifies the ethnographer’s coming of age as a legitimate anthropologist.

I raise the issue here because I feel that this discomfort with fieldwork is a common one among “heritage scholars” in Western academic institutions who have chosen, for either sentimental or professional reasons, to conduct research in their “home” countries. I believe that meaningful work can be produced by harnessing a disposition in which the distinction between “home” and “fieldwork” is itself a subject of intellectual reflection. Having been born in Cebu and raised in both Manila and Sydney, my experience with fieldwork

can be located somewhere in between “coming home” in a sentimental sense and “doing fieldwork” in a professionally academic sense. Such a disposition is not uncommon and has been the source of cathartic and even self-indulgent research premised on addressing protracted identity crises. This kind of displacement does not have to be disconcerting, however. On the contrary, the value of extended periods of research lies in having the opportunity to learn to trust and harness one’s own instinctive knowledge and intuitive feel for local life worlds. It can also encourage the impetus for thinking about the importance of metatheory in the praxis of research activity. This is not to say, however, that the knowledge produced from this disposition is one that is the same as a “native ethnographer” who may be motivated by a different sentiment and idea of home. The experience of heritage scholarship is fuelled, I submit, by a certain kind of nostalgia that has a great capacity to produce unique insights into many facets of local experience, in spite of foreign passports and dual allegiances. The chapters that follow reflect this sense of comfortable, intellectually productive displacement.

Having said this, however, it is important to point out that this book is not merely one that applies Western-derived theories and methodologies to the local context of Cebu.4 To be sure, many works have diagnosed the shortcomings of non-Western social sciences, decrying tendencies towards mimicry, irrelevance, and intellectual dependency.5 However, works that prescribe exactly how alternatives to such tendencies can be fostered, or even what such alternative works might look like are the exception rather than the norm. As Alatas (2006, 64) observes:

There is hardly any original metatheoretical or theoretical analysis emerging from the Third World. While a significant amount of empirical work is generated in the Third World, much of this takes its cues for research agenda, theoretical perspectives and methods from research in the West. Dependence on ideas is the general condition of knowledge in the Third World. Although scholarly communities have tirelessly pointed out ethnocentric biases in the Western social sciences, the emergence of autonomous and alternative theoretical traditions are yet to be seen.

What I aim to contribute in this figuring of Catholicism is to foster an alternative discourse for Asian social sciences that may serve as a

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA14 15INTRODUCTION

form of liberation from a certain kind of academic dependency inherent in works produced in the Third World. As Alatas notes (172), works must seek ways to redress the influence of Eurocentrism in the social sciences, such that “the quest for alternative discourse is simultaneously the quest for a liberating discourse because of the specific historical circumstances in which the Third World finds itself.”

What would such an alternative discourse look like? How can we produce work that counteracts Eurocentric or essentialist tendencies typical of knowledge produced in and about the “Third World”? By the same token, how can we produce work that avoids the tendency to prioritize the use of Western sources? Alatas has itemized the features of such alternative discourses. He defines (83) “alternative” as “that which is relevant to its surroundings—is creative, non-imitative and original, non-essentialist, counter-Eurocentric, autonomous from the state and autonomous from other national or transnational groupings.” The agenda to redress Eurocentric discourses should not necessitate a kind of nativist analysis that rejects Western thought outright. This book does not seek to replace the indigenized discourse of the West for the nativist Filipino discourse.6 What I seek to foster, rather, is an expansion of our intellectual horizons in displacing and decentering the epistemological primacy of a Western intellectual tradition. At this stage, only one indigenized body of social theory, that of the West, takes pre-eminence in works dealing with the Santo Niño. Alternative discourse in this context refers to gaining knowledge about Santo Niño through a heuristic that, as Charkrabarty (2000, 22) has discussed, “provincializes Europe”:

Provincializing Europe both begins and ends by acknowledging the indispensability of European political thought to representations of non-European political modernity, and yet struggles with the problems of representations that this indispensability invariably creates.

Chakrabarty here acknowledges that an alternative discourse for understanding non-European realities does not necessitate a recourse to nativist polemics. What is necessary, however, is a certain kind of reflexivity that goes beyond being honest and explicit about our limitations as scholars. Rather, provincializing Europe is an acknowledgment of the need for a certain scholarly eclecticism that tempers the use of Euro-

American frameworks with the considered appropriation of scholarship produced in the locality in which one is studying.

While I relate, or at times stand critical of, American cultural anthropology, French Poststructuralism, and the New Historicism of the “Melbourne school,” this book takes as much critical insight from the capacity of local Filipino scholarship as sources for analytical frameworks and data. Historians such as Reynaldo Ileto, Vicente Rafael, anthropologists such as Albert Alejo, S.J., and cultural critics such as Resil Mojares exert equal, if not more influence in the intellectual moorings of figuring Catholicism. And while the fostering of a truly alternative discourse requires more than just citing organic scholarship, I hope to begin my own journey in this endeavor by invoking at least in spirit the call for a decentering of European scholarship articulated so well by the likes of Chakrabarty, Alatas, and the Filipino scholars I mention above.

ETHNOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS We shall begin the discussion by focusing on the more tangible (as opposed to rhetorical or discursive) figuring of the Santo Niño. The focus here is on various devotional activities that surround the statue enshrined in Basilica Minore of Cebu City today. A depiction of different organizations worshipping the figure will be made in the context of a theoretical discussion of Christian iconography in the Philippines, conditioned as they are by successive foreign colonial regimes. In enacting a literal and metaphorical distinction between the Santo Niño inside and outside the Basilica, the first chapter will examine both the organized forms of Santo Niño devotion as well as those spontaneous and on the ground. How are the figure’s devotees distinguished according to the descriptive and semantic categories imposed by the Church authority? The chapter will examine how the various modes of worshipping the Santo Niño bring issues of class and ethnicity into stark and often contesting distinction.

The second chapter focuses on two periods of Spanish arrivals in Cebu—1521 and 1565—as they are remembered through popular history, the landscape, and religious iconography. It is not so much a background history to the Santo Niño as it is an elucidation of the underpinnings of a discourse of discovery, describing its allegorical and metaphorical links to the figure today. Here I will trace the lineage of the discourse of discovery in the ways in which Cebuanos became emplotted into European conceptions of paganism, and how their

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA16 17INTRODUCTION

exoticism was domesticated into the discursive universe of Spanish missionaries and colonial administrators. As will be seen, this was not always a straightforward process in light of Cebuanos’ own actions of hostility and recalcitrance to Spanish designs.

The third chapter questions how the Santo Niño fared during a time when American expansionism and Protestant missionization presented challenges to its continued existence. I seek to describe a political and social environment that sought to promote an American “Christianization” of Filipinos in ways that redressed the perceived moral and political decadence of the Spanish Friarocracy. In this regard, prevailing ideas about idolatry had provided a context in which the moral and doctrinal differences between Spanish Roman Catholicism and American Protestantism could be articulated. Such differences complimented the rhetoric of the “benevolent assimilation” of the islands whose inhabitants were manifestly destined towards liberal democracy. The Santo Niño’s emergence from this period of social and political turmoil becomes remarkable in this sense. As we shall see, the survival of the Santo Niño is seen as a metaphorical and literal manifestation of the victory of Catholicism in the Philippines.

Having described the triumphalist platform on which the Santo Niño stood, it becomes possible in the fourth chapter to discuss the circumstances in which the icon had transcended its provincial identifications to become a nationally revered icon. In describing events of great religious and national significance—primarily the quatercentenary celebrations in 1965 and, to a lesser extent that of 1921—this chapter suggests that the Santo Niño’s popularity can be traced to acts of promotion and inculcation that sought to link the history of the Santo Niño to the history of the nation itself. In this sense, this chapter connects very strongly with the second.

While the first chapter laid the groundwork for an understanding of the complex interplay between folk and official Catholicism, the fifth is a discussion of the notion that the Santo Niño is a harmonizing, syncretic deity. In this chapter, I inquire into processes by which the figure symbolizes a distinctive type of Filipino Catholicism that synthesizes the modern and the ancient, the official and the sensational, the pagan and the enlightened. I will argue against the conception of the Philippine Catholic Church as a monolithic entity that is largely intolerant of folk religious practices. Insofar as the official stand of the Catholic Church in the Philippines is one of contextualization and accommodation, the

chapter will point out some ways in which it positions itself as the sole source of tolerating unorthodox means of worship, thereby preserving their semantic and discursive powers of authenticating and legitimizing Filipino religious belief.

The subject of the sixth chapter is the history of use (or misuse) of religious iconography, focusing on the Santo Niño and, to a lesser extent, the Our Lady of EDSA in Metro Manila. Through the semantically open appropriation of their meanings, these religious icons have become utilized by Filipinos as symbols of protest against the State and, indeed, against the Church institution as well. The question here is how these icons are brought to bear on revolutionary causes and agendas, in ways that have outstripped the spiritual and theological functions for which they were intended. What are the ways in which religious iconographies contextualize and figure mass action in the Philippines? What are the semantic and discursive processes by which revolutions are designated and conceived of as holy while others are not?

The final chapter asks where the Santo Niño figures in Filipino attempts to foster an identity in opposition to their colonizers. In engaging in literary and historiographical acts of “soul-searching,” Filipinos constructed and revived a glorious past autonomous from and recalcitrant to the colonial-prescribed renderings of their racial and ethnic origins. An associated project in this regard was the discursive localization of the Santo Niño through works of scholarship that sought to deny its foreign affiliations while supplanting to it a distinctly Filipino or Asian origin. In this sense, the task of this chapter is to trace how Cebuano devotion to the Santo Niño became allegorically and metaphorically associated with Cebu’s own claims to political legitimacy. But it will also elucidate the friction that exists within the project of fostering a Filipino nation as a collective united in an over-arching metahistory.

Outside the Philippines, Cebu is better known for the beach resorts found across the island and its surrounding areas. Such idyllic

settings, however, belie the ghastly events of violence that characterize the past of Cebu. It is somewhat hard to picture that in the very shores where tourists frolic and play, the foremost emissary of the Spanish Empire was brutally vanquished by Bisayan warriors in the sixteenth

FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA18

century—an event that encouraged even further the Iberian Court’s imperialistic resolve, and had influenced the course of history of the whole archipelago for centuries to come. Venturing deeper inland, one is able to bear witness to another intriguing side to Cebu. There are still many who visit here because it caters to more carnal pursuits that today seem an indelible feature of the seedy undercurrent of any Southeast Asian city. Yet in the same humid spaces, where vice and indulgence are accommodated for a price, can be found the spiritual soul of the Philippine nation whereupon Christianity is said to have first made a profound impact in the hearts and minds of its citizens. It is on this at times contradictory, spiritual plane of Cebu that the Santo Niño is located, and from where we seek to embark upon the journey to understand the various ways in which the figure itself is “figured.”