In celebration of the sesquicentennial (150th) birth anniversary of Dr. Jose Rizal, the Philippine's national hero, I asked my graduate students to visit museums that exhibit memorabilia for our dear renaissance Filipino man Jose Rizal, attend local and international academic symposium on The First World-Class Filipino Jose Rizal, travel to his ancestral house in Laguna, or pay respect to one of Asia's great intellectuals enshrined at Luneta Park, and so on...
I am posting in my blog with the writer's consent selected ethnography penned creatively by my students to contribute to the emerging sub-discipline of anthropology called 'Virtual Ethnography'.
Basically, virtually ethnography is also referred to as Webnography. We cannot deny the fact that with increasing use of technology and the Internet, there is now a demand for online spaces on various ethnographic accounts.
»Was? Es dürfte kein Cäsar auf euren Bühnen sich zeigen,
Kein Achill, kein Orest, keine Andromacha mehr?«
-Friedrich Schiller, Shakespeares Schatten
“Qué? No podria un Cesar presentarse
En vuestras tablas? No más un Aquiles,
Un Orestes ó Andromaca mostrarse?
-Rizal’s Translation
Ethnography by Frances Cruz
Rizal in the 21st Century was an International Sesquicentennial Conference held in UP Diliman last June, in celebration of the hero’s 150th anniversary. In light of the celebratory atmosphere, the conference took place in the recently-opened GT Toyota Building, with its inviting white walls and modern architecture, open towards Filipinos and foreigners alike.
Filipino students are likely to encounter Rizal three times in their academic life. Once in high school, when the Noli is taken up, the second time for the study of El Fili, and last but not least, in the required college course on Rizal. While there may be other extraneous encounters with some places Rizal once inhabited, many still understand Rizal as part of history – not as part of one’s everyday life. This conference’s theme begged to differ. Indeed, Rizal’s relevance across time and space was implied by the conference’s umbrella theme, 21st Century local and global perspectives.
The lectures highlighted a wide range of topics, which included Rizal in the Digital Age and Popular Culture, Rizal in the Filipino Diaspora, Politics and Rizal, and Foreign perspectives on Rizal. It is not unknown to most people that Rizal was a well-traveled psycho-and allocentric, in addition to being the face of Philippine nationalism. But particularly striking about the program was just how international the roster was, how much Rizal mattered to people from all over the world. Visitors from as far as France, Belgium and Spain were invited to the Philippines just to participate in the conference. What was interesting to me was how holistic the significance of Rizal actually was, crossing fields such as anthropology, media, literature, politics and linguistics. The continuing construction and re-construction of the hero in the 21st Century was also a poignant theme of the discussions.
As for me, I was curious about how Rizal was viewed by foreigners. What could they possibly wish to learn from a hero who fought for Philippine nationalism? My interest stemmed perhaps from my experience as an undergraduate, when a German professor of mine from Heidelberg told me stories about Rizal’s statue and park in Wilhelmsfeld, Germany, a municipality not far off from Heidelberg itself. One of the very first reports delivered on Rizal’s significance to foreigners was related to his ‘Malayness’, whereby the scholarly ascent of the “Malay Cultural Industry” in other South-East Asian countries has somehow dismissed Rizal’s thought, or even Malay-ness.
It is not difficult to see why defining a particular identity has become of socio-political importance in Malaysia, where there the political field is divided among ethnic lines; an issue which carries little weight in our own domestic politics. Yet Rizal was instrumental in trying to recapture the agency of South East Asian culture in the face of ethnocentric Western anthropological claims, as Michael Tan discussed in his lecture. In the case of Dr. Tan’s report, Rizal’s importance for a wider target group (Malays, South East Asians, Colonized countries, etc.) was stressed, and could perhaps serve as a counterpoint to the exclusion of his contributions in some regional literature. But could Rizal be considered as transnational? This was taken up in one of the symposia called Nationalism and Transnationalism. The presentation of Milagros Guerrero used a historical approach to describe how Spanish political conditions distracted the government from the propaganda movement coming from the periphery. Later, during the open forum A question was raised about the degree to which Rizal could be considered ‘transnational’, as Rizal did not live in a time when phenomena like transnationalism were acknowledged. Instead, his passion for nationalism was emphasized, as opposed to the borderless appeal of transnationalism.
I wondered, if, despite the historical approaches used in the Nationalism & Transnationalism panel, Rizal wasn’t in fact a national hero that had managed to grow with times. He had been important to many other countries, including Russia, where it was reported that he is of great interest to Russian Filipinologists, as well as scholars from other countries that wish to study Rizal’s literature, translations, socio-cultural and political significance and his life story itself. In terms of the cultural exchange that occurred through Rizal, it also works the other way. Rizal was inspired by foreigners in turn, as seen in his incorporation of Schiller’s Shakespeares Schatten and Heine’s Goetter im Exil in his writings. A colleague of mine in the German section, who wrote her thesis on this subject, was unfortunately not able to present her paper due to torrential rains.
To sum up, it is clear that even in this age of globalization, the image of Rizal is widely passively consumed by millions of Filipinos, even if they are not interested in Rizal from a scholarly perspective. During the conference, Vladimir Gonzales reported on Rizal as metatext: the possibilities of Rizal as a fan fiction material, where he studied selected pieces of Rizal-themed fan fiction on the Internet, revealing an interesting link between pop culture and what one often regards as ‘high’ culture. I had already encountered some of the expressions of Rizal as a Pop Cultural Icon on the net, when I visited the homepage of Gerry Alanguilan, a comic artist from Laguna, who draws comics of an alternate time where the Philippines is a first world country and Rizal makes use of his talents to invent new technologies. Whether through digital art, literature or political movements, it seems as though no matter what the context, Rizal, is recreated to serve present realities, here and elsewhere. Just like any classic.
No comments:
Post a Comment