A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Cornell University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Geronimo Factoran Cristobal, Jr
Cornell University 2026 

This dissertation examines the material culture of nacre and pearls in the Philippine archipelago at various episodes from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century, situating these marine substances within the wider maritime networks of the Islamicate world. While pearls, shellcraft, Islamic amulets, and the maritime societies of Mindanao and Sulu have each generated substantial bodies of scholarship, these subjects have largely been studied in isolation. Pearls appear in histories of trade and extraction; shells in natural history and collecting; amulets in studies of religion and popular belief; and Sulu material culture within regional ethnographies. The result is a fragmented historiography that obscures the ways these objects historically intersected within shared circuits of art and devotion, craft production, and maritime exchange. By bringing these fields into conversation, the dissertation argues that nacre and pearls functioned not merely as luxury commodities but as media through which efficacy, religious knowledge, and sovereignty were articulated across the transimperial Philippines.

The project begins from the observation that mother-of-pearl occupied a distinctive place within the material imagination of Maritime Southeast Asia. Iridescent, layered, and oceanic in origin, nacre appeared in objects as diverse as Qurʾanic scroll and amulet cases, weapon fittings, reliquaries, devotional badges, architectural screens, and luxury furnishings. Its luminous surface lent itself to inscription, inlay, and optical display, while its marine provenance connected it to broader beliefs concerning sacred power. Rather than treating these objects solely as decorative arts or ethnographic artifacts, the dissertation examines how their material properties shaped practices of making, collecting, devotion, and exchange.

The study also addresses the archival challenges posed by marine materials. Nacre and pearls do not conform neatly to the classificatory regimes through which colonial knowledge was organized. They appear variously as commodities, natural specimens, luxury goods, ethnographic curiosities, devotional objects, and talismans. Consequently, the archive scatters evidence across missionary accounts, natural histories, museum collections, customs records, travel narratives, and vernacular traditions. Much of the knowledge associated with these substances circulated through workshops, fishing communities, ritual specialists, and maritime trading networks rather than through centralized textual institutions, leaving behind fragmented traces that resist conventional historical reconstruction.

Drawing upon the vernacular concepts of agimat, the dissertation explores how marine substances mediated relationships between talismanic efficacy and religious devotion across Muslim, Christian, and indigenous communities. Each chapter follows nacre and related pelagic materials through sites of extraction, workshops of transformation, collections of curiosity, and circuits of exchange extending from the Sulu Sea to the wider Indian Ocean world. In doing so, the dissertation demonstrates that the Philippine archipelago participated in a shared visual and material culture linking Southeast Asian port cities to broader Islamicate and global networks.  The title, Pearls of Disorient, signals the dissertation’s broader intervention. Borrowing from the colonial epithet “Pearl of the Orient,” it reframes the Orient from an ambiguous place produced by the West to a verb, pearls and nacre as active materials through which communities navigated the uncertainties of the maritime world. By placing historically meaningful marine matters at the center of inquiry, the dissertation offers an art history of the Philippines grounded in oceanic exchange, material agency, and the devotional lives of things.