This essay is an English translation of Zeus A. Salazar’s “Pantayong Pananaw como discurso civilizacional,” published in Revista Filipina, Segunda Etapa, Spring 2015, vol. 2, no. 2.

I have retained Salazar’s Filipino terminology because the distinctions among tayo, kami, kayo, and sila are fundamental to the argument. Apparent chronological anomalies are corrected. My own annotations [Geronimo Cristobal] follow after Salazar’s endnotes.

Preamble

The perspective known as Pantayong Pananaw emerged from my analysis of the different historical interpretations involved in our process of national formation. During the first half of the 1970s, the principal subject of this analysis constituted a significant part of my teaching on historiography, in which the methodology, philosophy, and processes of writing history were studied. In particular, in 1974 I expressed this general view at Malacañang’s request during the preparation of the work Filipino Heritage.

At the time, I criticized the approach presented in this encyclopedia because it was not pantayo—“about us, for us, without concern for others”—but pangkami—“from us, about us, for you who know nothing about us.” It spoke from outside, either from elitist groups or through ideas entirely alien to the thought of the Filipino people, rather than from a genuinely Filipino viewpoint. This was the case for two reasons. First, the language was foreign—English—and therefore incomprehensible to the majority of Filipino society. Second, there was a tendency to circumscribe our culture as an object or subject of studies conducted by foreigners: studies that did not originate within the society being studied and were not undertaken by members of that society. Consequently, these studies generated concepts, sentiments, and forms of conduct detached from the historical current of Filipino civilization extending into the present.

This determined the resulting kind of historiography. For those who produced the encyclopedia, what mattered was displaying the opinions and judgments of the elite about the masses for their own satisfaction, while winning foreign approval through their own pleasure and seductiveness. This has practically remained Malacañang’s strategy to the present. Obstinacy then—and bad faith today as well—has led us to explain and understand our country through foreign eyes instead of first understanding ourselves and then our historical evolution through our own ideas, languages, values, achievements, and accomplishments within the current of our history.

In truth, there is no difference between Filipino Heritage and the encyclopedia published by Zoilo Galang, apart from new information, authors, and works. Afterward, during the 1980s, Malacañang planned to prepare another English-language encyclopedia based on the same approach. I cannot properly understand what differences might exist among encyclopedias intended for Americans, English people, Australians, and other Anglo-Americans, except that: first, the events would be discussed by people of Filipino nationality; second, Filipino historians might imitate such a model; and third, the work would “help” foreigners to “write our history.” There must clearly be some connection between these projects of “assistance” devised by elites and foreigners and economic policy, or something similar.

This explains the “ambiguous” idea of the Filipino offered by the encyclopedia. The main objective of such works has always been to obtain a sui generis version of how Filipinos have been seen by foreigners, for the gratification of the elite and to justify their exercise of power through a foreign language, English. This explains why our history has not been written from the experience and evolution of the Filipino people for the Filipino people. Paradoxically, it leaves aside the sensibility that forged the nation, which I call Pantayong Pananaw.

What, then, does Pantayong Pananaw actually mean?

I. THE CONCEPT OF PANTAYONG PANANAW

The principal objective of Pantayong Pananaw is to enter into the connections that bring together abilities, knowledge, understandings, desires, and experiences within an entire historical development expressed through one language. It therefore enters into a shared civilizational expression or discourse, a conception that exists in every ethnolinguistic group in every part of the world.

In any Philippine language, we can find concepts interchangeable with those appearing in Tagalog or Pilipino/Filipino:

• kayo: “you,” plural;
• kami: “we, excluding the person or people to whom we are speaking”;
• sila: “they”;
• tayo: “all of us, naturally including me, but not the others who do not participate in our discourse, conversation, or group.”

The last of these refers to the person speaking and those to whom that person speaks, while also including the people and members of the speaker’s group, society, or community, even when they are not present. Consequently, it includes both senders and receivers. One says, for example, tayong mga Filipino—“we Filipinos”—rather than kaming mga Filipino—“we Filipinos, excluding you”—thereby implicitly indicating that the addressee is also Filipino.

In principle, neither tayo nor kami includes foreigners or non-Filipinos. In practice, however, foreigners may be included because Filipinos and non-Filipinos can, when necessary, speak the same language, as in the case of the Propagandists’ use of Spanish. In the case of tayo, an idea, concept, disposition, or matter of shared interest can be readily understood because the discourse includes our own society and civilization as transmitted through the same language. We can connect everything without having to select an external concept, disposition, or set of ideas to join them. There are, in fact, many things that we understand and connect implicitly. Such an attitude creates a shared “mentality”—a specific and particular conception—that is difficult to understand from a perspective external to that historical development and conception. It is presented “from our point of view, by us and for us”: pantayong pananaw.

Fundamentally, the concept refers to a group of people speaking from within its own concerns, as a closed system in which everything can be understood without recourse to external elements. In this sense, any society or culture possesses a pantayong pananaw only when everything is based on concepts and characteristics that all members know and share semantically. This would be possible if there were a single code or “significant equivalence”: a comprehensive network of meanings, ideas, and characteristics. Having a language as the basis and means of understanding the communicative act is therefore fundamental.

The concept can be readily understood by considering the ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippines. Tagalogs possess a language and understand one another through that language regarding the meaning of an idea or symbol. In ancient times, even religion was one, involving belief in anitos and mythological figures such as “Bathala.” The principal ancient epics and songs were based on this mythical figure. With the arrival of the Spaniards, the ritual form was transformed into the Pasyon, while the principal character—Bathala—was replaced by the God of the Spaniards, Christ.

Before the arrival of the Spaniards, every ethnic group possessed its own pantayong pananaw. The concept therefore includes the ability to connect the elements of a society through its adaptation to its environment and its capacity to share those experiences with members of the native group in their own language.

It is understandable that pantayong pananaw is not normally apparent to the members of a society when its culture, or kalinangan, remains strong. Through the reality that members possess of themselves, no special ability is required to learn the cultural perspective, unless external elements are introduced into—and then accepted within—its fundamental basis. The perspective is expressed through attitudes, actions, and forms of behavior founded on a language and a kalinangan, as naturally as a fish lives in water.

When external elements are introduced from outside this framework, they must necessarily be explained according to the values they possess for the other culture or society. The new meaning must then be shared and made intelligible in one’s own language. The resulting perspective might be pansila—“about them”—meaning that “for them” a particular thing signifies something.

When one attempts to explain to foreigners a viewpoint external to them, one uses the pangkami perspective: “we, about us, for you.” The problem here is one of analyzing from within one’s own society and kalinangan for an external audience. This makes it necessary to compare other systems with the characteristics of the members of the system from which one is speaking. A foreign language will also tend to be used, depending on cultural and sociopolitical motivations.

For example, when a sixteenth-century Tagalog traveled to Brunei or Malacca, an explanation of Tagalog culture might have been given in Malay, the former lingua franca of Southeast Asia, or in Tagalog when speaking to people belonging to the Tagalog linguistic domain. Suppose the Tagalog intended to fight against the people of Brunei and conquer them for several years. He might say: “All of you are different. You are such-and-such a people, unlike us, who are Tagalogs. You are different from us.” We may call this kind of conversation pangkayong pananaw: “from your point of view.” Pangkayo is the perspective of someone from within a particular kalinangan speaking to people outside it about those people and their characteristics.

The culmination of pantayong pananaw in the course of our history was altered by colonialism, which gradually transformed the ethnolinguistic groups throughout the country. The surface that colonial rule transformed eventually became the Nasyong Pilipino, the “Filipino nation.” Because the colonial process was established and promoted through the Spanish language—and later through the Anglo-American educational system accepted and sanctioned by the elite for the nation as a whole—and because sociopolitical concepts were introduced by Hispanic and subsequently American culture, the use of a foreign language produced the contradiction through which the nation was created.

This is why the Filipino nation does not possess, or does not yet possess, a pantayong pananaw capable of defining the national whole. In practical terms, if we wish to create such a Filipino nation, we must improve and develop our own sociopolitical viewpoint for the entire nation: a viewpoint that gives us national identity and national capacities.

II. PANTAYONG PANANAW IN HISTORY

Before the coming of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, there was no uniform pantayong pananaw encompassing all the ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippine archipelago, despite their racial and cultural relationships. The Filipino nation did not exist as we understand it today and certainly did not encompass all the peoples now described by the term “Filipino.” The Filipino nation was created only in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the result of efforts undertaken by the elite of the Spanish colonial system, which had been exposed to Western culture through the Spanish language and Hispanic culture.

For this reason, I call the elite an “acculturated population group.” Acculturation began when a segment of the population acquired a culture originating outside itself. This group was formed by the ladinos, the first people to learn Spanish. The ladinos assisted Spanish friars in evangelization and in transmitting culture from the West. They also communicated indigenous languages, concepts, and ideas to the priests. In their minds, Spanish was transformed by the native elements through which they introduced it into the archipelago.

A children’s poem from the American period may reflect what occurred:

“One day / isang araw,
I saw / nakakita,
one bird / isang ibon.”

The same character can be observed in bilingual ladino poems composed by Fernando Bagong Banta.

In brief, these acculturated ladinos assisted Westerners in the process of cultural transmission and were themselves unquestionably colonized.

The connections between Spaniards and ladinos were complex, making transfer and exchange one of the richest aspects of Spanish colonialism. What occurred was the Westernization of the concept of kalinangan through an indigenous mentality, as the historian Vicente Rafael demonstrated in his thesis published as Contracting Colonialism.

Beginning in the third decade of the nineteenth century, these ladinos were gradually incorporated into the Spanish colonial system as clerks, salesmen, secretaries, petty lawyers, agents, notaries, or assistants to the alcalde or another Spanish official. Others entered the system through religion as priests—members of the secular clergy, since Filipinos were not accepted as friars or Jesuits.

During the first decade of the nineteenth century, they began to react aggressively against the Spanish system in search of a more important role in the Philippine Church. This was how the Filipino priest entered the ecclesiastical administration and assumed the direction of certain parishes. The term “Filipino priest” should be understood here as encompassing people born in the Philippines: indios, Filipino-Chinese mestizos, Filipino-Spanish mestizos, and Spanish creoles born in the Philippines. The latter had traditionally been regarded as the true “Filipinos” until the second decade of the nineteenth century.

The Filipino secular clergy as a social group can therefore be said to have begun with the ladinos. The secular priests, however, expanded the mediating role that the ladinos had performed between the local Spanish friar and the rest of Spanish society. The friar became a competitor of the Filipino secular priest, whereas the ladino could only have become the friar’s assistant.

The Filipino priest was competent in Spanish culture and language and could therefore compete with the Spanish friar for ecclesiastical power in the Philippines. A discourse criticizing the indigenous priest consequently developed, as demonstrated by the letter of Fray Gaspar de San Agustín, the first to make the controversy public. Spanish friars and Jesuits had to diminish the capacities of indigenous people: “All of you indios possess no civilization; you are barbarous, ungrateful, and arrogant.”

The Filipino secular priests were not the only people criticized and insulted by Fray Gaspar de San Agustín and other Spaniards. The petty agents and lawyers joined the chorus, until the premise reached the masses and was paradoxically proclaimed as “the knowledge of the learned.”

Following the progression of acculturation from the ladinos and secular priests into the nineteenth century, the ilustrados appeared. They were ladinos educated through the writings of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Filipino ilustrados drew from the Spanish Enlightenment as well as the French Lumières.

Filipino priests wanted to acquire the same status as Spaniards, whether monks, friars, Jesuits, or Spanish secular priests. Above all, their struggle sought the secularization of all Philippine parishes, which would proportionally assign many more parishes to the indigenous clergy. The ladino was gradually transformed into the enlightened parish priest. Nevertheless, a distinction must be made between secular parish priests and ilustrados in the proper sense, since educated Filipinos also existed outside the Church.

In the nineteenth century, the Philippines possessed universities and colleges in which indios, Filipino-Sangley or Chinese mestizos, and Filipino-Spanish mestizos studied. Together with the so-called creoles—Filipino citizens or “children of the country”—they formed the center of enlightened education, not in the seminary but in the sociopolitical world. They constituted the nucleus of the intelligentsia and educated population of the Philippines.

They addressed peninsular Spaniards as equals, overcoming class distinctions through access to the colonizer’s language and demonstrating equality despite racial difference. The Spaniard claimed that everything the indio knew came only from Spain and divided history into two periods: the time in which there was neither Christianity nor civilization, and the period following the arrival of the Spaniard, who brought Christianity and civilization.

Because 90 or 95 percent of the population was Catholic, this historiographical division, transmitted in a foreign language, was not questioned. Moreover, the Moro—our present-day Bangsa Moro—never concerned himself with this historical division, nor did the other indigenous ethnic groups, including the Lumad or Lumadnon.

This means that the great majority of Filipinos possessing an original pantayong pananaw were separated from their other relatives, although they remained connected in terms of kalinangan. Consequently, a segment of the population remained substantially unaffected by the culture of Spanish colonialism and by the acculturation of the elites. Some groups have remained beyond direct contact with Western civilization even to the present.

How would acculturated ilustrados have reacted toward people whose culture and language were not Spanish within a colonial society, and at what level would the ilustrados have positioned themselves? They certainly did not accept that Spaniards occupied the highest position in colonial society.

Although they could speak the most refined Spanish—albeit in a Philippine accent, like López Jaena with his Visayan accent or Luna with his Ilocano accent—and although they dressed like Spaniards and shaved their mustaches in Spanish fashion, they were not Spaniards. They had flat noses, brown skin, and supposedly came from an uncivilized race. Within the colonial discrimination of the period, these traits clearly marked them as indios.

The presence of the Spaniard continually reminded the ilustrado of this discrimination and put him in his place. The ilustrado therefore reacted by defending himself and struggling against Spanish assertions regarding the incapacity of the indio.

At this point, the Filipino viewpoint was pangkami: it was not true that we possessed no civilization before the coming of the Spaniards. We had, in fact, a culture and connections with China, Indochina, India, and many other places. Making this reality visible before the eyes of the Filipino people was the principal objective pursued by the Propagandists.

According to Rizal, indigenous sensibility faded after the arrival of the Spaniards because no one took an interest in cultivating it. Filipinos were incorporated into military companies established by the Spaniards within and beyond the archipelago. All compensation for their work benefited the Spaniards. Rizal’s ideas revolved around this issue: if the Spaniards disappeared, Filipino sensibility would recover from the most distant oblivion and illuminate the Philippines once again.

In this way, pangkaming pananaw stood at the forefront of the Propaganda Movement against the colonial historical ideology and prejudice that imagined Spanish civilization as transforming indigenous indolence and darkness into culture and religion.

The Propagandist, however, had to explain to Spaniards the irrelevance of the idea that the indio was uncivilized, necessarily doing so in the Spanish language. Pangkaming pananaw therefore presented opinions originating within Philippine society and culture, but addressed to the people who had colonized Philippine cities and ideas. Concepts and other elements had to be expressed in terms comprehensible to the colonizer, not through the kalinangan of the people, because the Propagandists authorized their arguments through Europe’s liberal tradition.

A national Filipino consciousness was consequently created through a foreign language and an external viewpoint alien to the native tradition, based on Spanish and European elements. This produced a “national culture” connected to “European civilization,” rather than to genuine “indigenous solidarity,” and therefore neglected the roots of the native land.

Everything cultivated with pride and dedication by the Propagandists became only one part of local history: the works created by indios and mestizos who became Spanish by recalling works produced by people like themselves. These elements became a ritual of memory because the ilustrado needed to separate himself from the Spaniards, who did not accept him as part of a colonial society centered upon Spanish—and, by extension, European—civilization.

In reality, the ilustrados, together with other social groups, were beneficiaries of colonial society and civilization, which operated in the Spanish language. From this perspective, they represented the final stage in the process of acculturation initiated by the ladinos.

When the Americans arrived, the ilustrados demonstrated that Filipinos could become doctors, lawyers, engineers, actors, actresses, and even winners of beauty contests. In this sense, the elite continually emphasized the “first Filipino” to succeed in such fields.

Unfortunately, we were always secondary, because someone else had always performed these activities or professions before a Filipino did. From that time until the present, we have therefore attempted to demonstrate that “the Filipino is not last,” continually judging Filipino work according to a foreign standard. Filipino accomplishments must first be blessed by foreigners before they are valued.

From the Propaganda period to the present, everything the Filipino has given to the world has been produced in a foreign language and culture: the language and culture imposed by—although some say “inherited” from—the Spanish or American colonizer. “Imitation is the rule here, imitating everything that comes from outside, because that is the only thing the Filipino has been taught to do.”

From the Spanish period until the present, the Propagandists wrote in a foreign language. This intellectual ritual continues from the ilustrados to the government pensionados, Fulbright scholars, and recipients of American, Japanese, and other forms of sponsorship. They proved that they could also perform intellectual work.

To write in Spanish—or later in American English—one had to become Spanish, later American, and even Japanese during the Japanese occupation. This was the Filipino’s aspiration. It required first distancing oneself from indigenous culture. One had to separate oneself from one’s own culture and then return to it, using elements borrowed from the Spanish—or subsequently American—“original.”

This was the Filipino-style intellectual work performed from Rizal and Paterno to Villa, Tiempo, and Locsin, Sr. and Jr. Their work became a local exercise—the “local color” of literary terminology—within the foreign culture to which they adhered.

The English language used during the American period continued to produce new “intellectuals” who worked as the ilustrados had during the Propaganda period. They created a national culture for Americanized Filipinos, American foreigners, and others who could speak English. It was natural that everything should be created from foreign foundations.

In other words, the dominant colonial perspectives were pansila—“from the foreigner for the foreigner”—and pangkami—“from us for the foreigner.” Colonial and postcolonial society and culture were products sustained by the Filipino elite and the foreigners who communicated with it through the colonizer’s language and categories.

Meanwhile, pantayong pananaw remained sheltered within the ethnic groups of society, whose members did not imagine that they would be taken as the model of the “nation” at the rebirth of the Republic.

III. PANTAYONG PANANAW IN THE PRESENT

In the exercise of knowledge and abilities, the establishment of a national elite resulted from the division of Filipinos into two classes:

1. The society and culture of the acculturated elite, speaking Anglo-American English after previously speaking Spanish and, during the period of collaboration, Japanese.
2. The culture and abilities of the nation whose general language of communication is now Tagalog or Filipino, while regional languages form the roots of the nation’s culture.

The society and culture constituting the elite’s protected domain were created through the efforts of different kinds of “intellectuals,” formed by political events and processes of social acculturation. Their acculturation can be described as a succession:

ladinos = secular priests = ilustrados = pensionados = Fulbright and Monbusho scholars = present-day intellectuals.

The last category includes contemporary scholars, writers, fellows, and visiting professors in the United States, Japan, and other countries from the colonial era to the present. They belong to another form of nineteenth-century ilustrado.

Through the pensionados and other newly acculturated groups, the elite learned the English language and American attitudes from the people who created a new colonial nation after the Spanish-American War. The nineteenth-century ilustrado found the transition difficult, as Nick Joaquin’s masterpiece—written, significantly, in English—demonstrates.

The pensionados became more important than the ilustrados once the new colonial ruler’s American educational system had been established. An activist might call this American imperialism.

The educational system molded the consciousness and minds of the newly acculturated people who created the “national culture.” Their entire intellectual production, especially in literature, can be readily explained as the result of the education imposed by the Americans. This can be seen in the works of Camilo Osías and in the earliest Filipino histories and poems written in American English and included in school anthologies.

The ambition motivating writers, as well as scientists, was to be recognized as quickly as possible, not by Filipinos, but by Americans in the United States. Everything that sounded indigenous therefore had to be cleansed away. This can be observed from Stevan—formerly Esteban—Javellana and José García Villa to Noriega, Abad, and Rosca today. The people do not read them because they are more attracted to writings in Tagalog or Filipino and in other Philippine languages.

In addition to forming new generations of people acculturated in English and the American way of life, the educational system affected every field: the economy, including banking, industry, and technology; culture, including education itself, cinema, literature, and the humanities; religion, through Protestantism following Catholic evangelization and through missionary expansion in remote regions such as the Cordillera and Mindanao; and politics, from the upper levels of the executive, legislature, and judiciary to provinces and municipalities, including the concept of the “revolutionary” opposed to the military.

All concepts and ideas in every field were disseminated and taught in English, within American forms of understanding and American prejudices. In other words, intellectual thought became captive to the ideas of Americans and the West. Even the struggle for freedom remained enclosed within the premises of the civilization and history of the United States and Europe.

The most critical moment involved the struggle among conservatives, liberals, and revolutionaries. First, they understood one another because they used the same categories of ideas, even though they pursued different objectives. Second, the conservative or liberal sided with the Americans, whereas the revolutionary sided first with the Russians and subsequently with the Chinese against the Americans.

Antiamerican ideology consequently became the basis of Filipino revolutionary movements. New ideas from the United States and Europe—including suffrage, feminism, poststructuralism, Third Worldism, deconstruction, and others—were transmitted in English, whether or not they were understood and whether or not they were most appropriate for the nation’s prosperity.

Foreign presence can be seen in every aspect and activity, from economics and politics to religion and culture. It is necessary, however, to explain this through a diagram demonstrating the “division of cultural development,” which caused Filipinos to be divided according to their orientations and attitudes.

In general, Philippine society as it is known today can be understood historically through two forms of cultivation or kalinangan.

The first is “national culture” or kulturang nasyonal. Beginning in the Propaganda period, it resulted in the establishment of a nation controlled by the elite.

The second is the “national spirit” or kalinangang bayan. It led Filipinos to create a nation born from the war of 1896. [The date appears as 1876 in the source.]

On one side stands the concept of the “Filipino nation,” or nasyong Filipino, which originated in the Spanish language—the nación and patria filipina—from the Propagandists to the revolutionaries. It subsequently continued through a linear succession:

[Aguinaldo] → Quezon → Osmeña → [Laurel] → Roxas → Quirino → Magsaysay → García → Macapagal → Marcos → Aquino.

This development was assisted by the Americans, explaining why English continues to mold the state.

On the other side stand the roots of the Filipino people’s historical experience and the forging of a nation in opposition to Western invasion. The meaning of this experience has never been transmitted through a foreign language, as demonstrated from the Bangkaw rebellion to Bonifacio and subsequently to Aguinaldo’s revolution in December 1899. [The date appears as 1879 in the source.]

The elite usually expresses its objectives and ideas through foreign languages. Tagalog or Filipino, by contrast, captured within society the people’s spirit of rebellion, particularly its messianic character, through the war of 1896.

Through the educational system, the elite promoted a national culture established by the Americans in the English language, exclusively for an elitist population and to provide workers and collaborators for the new colonial system. This is why all national structures and their sociopolitical, economic, religious, and intellectual contents are penetrated by foreign elements. It is also why the elite concentrates on foreigners and adopts the pangkami perspective.

This became the dominant perspective of the “national culture” or kulturang nasyonal, in which society and politics are determining forces. The dependency ultimately contracted with foreigners—whether the United States or other countries following similar strategies, such as Japan—is therefore understandable.

The elite wishes to study abroad, graduate abroad, and obtain the highest possible qualifications abroad. Some possess homes in the United States in addition to residences in Manila or nearby provinces. They communicate easily with Americans because their ideas and mentality derive from American culture. Some retire in America after completing their service in the Philippines, like American officials during the colonial period.

This must be considered before aspiring to become president of the Philippines: one supposedly needs first to receive the blessing of the Americans, as suggested by the obligatory official visit to Washington and the new president’s address before the United States Congress.

Even the person who “loves the masses” is rarely more intellectual than what he has read—and perhaps understood—in American books, sometimes concerning foreign cultures and civilizations. This includes secondhand progressive thought in literature and the fine arts, as well as structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and other “isms” originating in France and other European countries.

Like their political enemies, who belong to the same elite, they are merely secondhand photocopies of Americans. Everything they wish to disseminate throughout the nation can amount to little more than well-intentioned proposals.

The reasons for conflict between the elite and its “revolutionary” enemies are therefore, paradoxically, found in conflicts already existing within Western civilization, from which both sides draw. Those in power learn through categories that make them mere copies of foreigners. Neither of the contending sides produces an original idea.

The two opposing forces understand each other in ideological battle because they employ foreign languages and categories to articulate their ideas. Similarly, the forces sustaining the conflict originate outside the country: one side supports supposed economic development through “development aid,” while the other strengthens the ideology of its members through “proletarian internationalism.”

Both sides are poor imitations and photocopies of Americans. This explains the “cultural schizophrenia” dominating the elite, whether “ordinary,” “reactionary,” or “revolutionary.” Members of the elite continually compare themselves with others through a culture borrowed from foreigners.

This has caused the obsession with identifying the “first Filipino”: the first Filipino doctor, the first Filipino pilot, the first Filipino to achieve one distinction or another. It is also why pangkami remains the dominant perspective of what the elite calls “national culture.”

Nevertheless, pangkami is not the only possible perspective within national culture. Members of the elite can adopt pantayo when they speak solely from the interests of the national state and society.

Although the culture created by the elite is a photocopy, it can contain elements of ethnic and indigenous cultures. These elements must be recognized by the people living within the nation. The elite has represented itself as “Filipino” according first to Spanish and then American criteria. Ultimately, it has provided rag-like representations ranging from “Pueblo filipino” to “Filipino people,” which have sometimes been confused with the true Bayang Pilipino, the Filipino nation or people.

The elite unquestionably retains traces of the native or indigenous soul. This can be explained in several ways.

First, some members of the elite were born within a Filipino kalinangan—Tagalog, Maguindanao, Ibanag, or another—before entering the educational system and continuing their foreignization or alienation in America or elsewhere through postgraduate study. Their earliest education was received from their parents and from poor childhood companions.

Second, even those who did not experience childhood in the streets could not escape the education they received at home from servants, nursemaids, and young women employed in upper-class households.

This is the elite’s form of life in the city, and the diagram demonstrates the connection. Part of the spirit germinated in indigenous roots therefore remains within the national identity that the elite considers its own, even when that identity has been adopted from foreign patterns.

These roots are simultaneously a source of shame and pride. They provide the elite with the right to consider itself Filipino. Yet despite exercising control and influence over the indigenous population, the elite does not possess the people’s nature, character, or even appearance. Its ignorance of the true character of being Filipino is profound. The elite has been left adrift through Westernization.

This situation begins the second phase of the elite’s “cultural schizophrenia,” or iskizofrenyang pangkalinangan. Members of the elite do not know how to act in order to internalize their indigenous nature. Nor do they know what they must do—or what more they must do—to conceal the culture that penetrates every Filipino.

As the diagram demonstrates, they are part of a society and culture drawing from the same cultural and historical sources, but they became separated from the rest of the population by forming a new society through contact and mixture with foreigners. This is why they feel uncomfortable with the country’s wider culture.

Taking advantage of the situation, they engage in empty controversies through which they attempt to connect elements and create a national culture founded on their elitist condition. Three general aspects of this controversy can be identified.

The first places identity at the center: “Who am I? Who are we? What does it mean to be Filipino?” The need to ask such questions reveals the weakness of the elite’s capacity to govern a nation composed of people called Filipinos.

The elite connects national ability to blessings coming from outside as a result of colonialism. For members of the elite, being born Filipino is an accident of environment rather than a cultural consequence of historical development.

This is why the elite’s idea of national culture, promoted in English, centers on foreign “influence” or impluwensiya and imitation. The elite attempts to follow models engraved in its memory of identity, as in the so-called “rational history” promoted during martial law, in which the entire race and nation parades before the foreigner while proclaiming the transcendental role of the Filipino people.

The fundamental piece of the puzzle—the Filipino’s indigenous foundations—is thereby concealed. Years after the February 1986 revolutionary commemoration, ecumenical services were still conducted in a foreign language, as though they were intended for Jews. Did the Filipino language not exist? Cardinal Sin sang in Filipino the American song “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” which he had learned during the American period.

The elite has always taken pride in possessing a “varied,” halo-halo culture, extending this culinary expression into the realm of ideas. The Filipino is presented as a drum, empty inside but covered with exotic decoration, producing an unsophisticated sound.

This representation is untrue. The Filipino is dynamic and possesses a complete cultural wealth, deep roots, and the capacity to innovate. Such efforts are rendered ineffective by the external dependency the elite has created within the nation and its culture.

The elite has failed to recognize this because it is preoccupied with inheriting the colonial state, society, and culture, while relegating the society and culture that produced every Filipino and gave form to the “true child of the nation.”

This situation resulted from the historical challenge posed by the relationship between Filipino culture and the colonial cultures of the Spaniards and Americans. The supposed “great tradition” of the acculturated, Westernized elite was established against the “little tradition” of indigenous elements.

It therefore became easy for the elite to discriminate against bakya taste—the popular taste of mass culture—while favoring a refined high culture imported directly from abroad. Intellectual imitations of anything imported could consequently be categorized as Filipino culture.

Relations between the elite and indigenous society form the roots of the second and third aspects of confusion.

The second concerns the elite’s identity conflict in relation to foreigners. Filipinos are expected to create ideals according to intellectual categories defined by foreigners and foreign cultures. These ideals are regarded as inherently “good” and especially suitable for molding the masses through history.

Concepts such as palabra de honor are established instead of indigenous concepts such as paninindigan, or determination, and puri’t dangal, or dignity. Likewise, delicadeza is used instead of paggalang, respect, or hiya, a sense of propriety or modest restraint. These imported formulations define how Filipinos are expected to behave.

Ibn Parfahn, a Filipino who wrote Malayan Grandeur, argued that the same racist logic could be turned against the idea of “white supremacy,” and that Filipinos should instead value the greatness of the Malay race to which they belonged.

The third aspect of the elite’s confusion is the inverse of the second: judging and institutionalizing the supposed “true Filipino attitude.”

As a substitute for white colonialism, the elite continually criticizes the “indolence of the Filipino masses,” while publicly displaying the industriousness of farmers, drivers, laborers, and others. Elite judgments concerning the katutubong Pilipino, the indigenous Filipino, are taken too far.

More important, however, is the way both the idealization of the Filipino and the elite’s contrary reactions reveal its confusion and lack of understanding of Philippine society and culture.

Despite this confusion, the elite retains the capacity to control society through its connections with it. Politics offers an example. To be elected to Congress, politicians must speak the language of the nation—Tagalog or Filipino, or the language of the ethnolinguistic group to which they belong. Yet when they arrive in Manila, laws are written in English, a language ordinary people do not understand.

There is therefore a complete lack of mutual comprehension between society and politicians. Understanding remains outside the door, creating an enormous separation between the activities conducted by the elite through political power and the population. The same applies to the elite’s businesses, its collusion with foreigners, and the economy.

Possessing two languages—English, the language of the United States and colonial culture, and Tagalog or Filipino together with other national languages—can also mean possessing two faces.

The elite maintains two residences: one in metropolitan Manila and another in the province it represents. Some also possess residences in the United States, where their children study.

The law, which the elite maintains and promotes, is founded on experiences of “emotional justice.” Cinema has expressed this in the phrase: “The law is yours; justice is mine.” The Western legislative apparatus belongs to the elite, whereas society possesses justice according to the masses’ understanding of what is right.

The national culture or kulturang nasyonal established by the elite became an instrument of social domination. It is natural that this culture should continue the colonial culture of the colonizer whom the elite replaced in economic and political power.

The development of society is demonstrated in the diagram, beginning with the different ethnolinguistic groups and the wider Austronesian continuum connecting Madagascar, Indo-Malaysia, and the Austronesian cultures of the Pacific Ocean as far as Hawai‘i and New Zealand’s Māori.

As the diagram again demonstrates, foreign elements entered the Philippines in two ways.

The first was through the creation of a “national culture” by means of the educational system, intended to make people first Spanish and subsequently American. Belonging to the economic elite also enabled people to enter prestigious schools and universities, including De La Salle and Ateneo and, in the preceding decade, the University of the Philippines. Some members of this elite came from major cities such as Cebu and Manila.

The second route began within an ethnolinguistic group through acculturation, whether Tagalog, Bicolano, Ilocano, Ilonggo, or another. People following this route remained more distant from the development of the great cities and could identify more closely with indigenous Filipinos.

There are many examples: the Cojuangcos of Tarlac, the Syquias of Ilocos, the Locsins of Negros, the Tans of Sulu, and many others. Once incorporated into an ethnolinguistic group, they do not differ structurally from other Filipinos, whether members of the elite or the masses.

The same may be said of Americans and other foreigners who settle in the Philippines. They are directly connected to the elite, particularly when they study in American schools in the country, such as the international school.

Because of their deeper affective identification, they may also experience distance from the development of the nation. Indeed, they may become one of the causes of that separation: the elite maintains what it calls a “national culture,” while the rest of society maintains kalinangang bayan, the people’s cultural environment or indigenous cultural matrix.

Some continue to maintain older cultural identities, whether Chinese, Indian, or American. The continuation of such connections is used to justify their supposed non-Filipino identity. They are said to show no sign of being Filipino.

Their identity within Philippine society becomes part of the problem of ethnic belonging, which also emerges in discussions of “minorities,” including the Bangsa Moro, Lumad, and Igorot.

Every ethnolinguistic group or community—Tausug, Bicol, Sugboanon, and others—and every community of foreigners—Chinese, Indian, or any other nationality settled in the country—that has not abandoned its own linguistic identity possesses its own pantayong perspective.

Only the supposed national culture established by the elite possesses a pangkami perspective. It is pangkami because its members center attention upon themselves, while their principal concern is the national community’s relations with political authorities. Their objective is to protect their interests and acquire global privileges.

They therefore possess no pantayong perspective within the circles in which they move. They remain at the same level as the Propagandists of a century ago under Spanish colonial rule.

Their connection to the country nevertheless links them to other parts of the Philippines, particularly ideologically. Examples include Muslims and their connection to Islam, or the Cordillera peoples and their defense of indigenous values. In this respect, they are curiously not different from other political forces, including communists, military and messianic groups, and other movements that have emerged throughout Philippine history.

All Filipino ethnolinguistic groups—Kalinga, Bicol, Waray, Samal, and others—as well as communities of foreigners such as Chinese and Indians possess a pantayong perspective. The development of a Filipino identity must draw from the same tradition.

As already stated, the foreigner is initially the only person without these roots. The rest of the population represents a continuation of indigenous society or kalinangang bayan.

How should a pantayong perspective for an encompassing community be produced from the radiation of the pantayong perspectives of the ethnolinguistic groups?

One possibility would be to distinguish imported elements—religions such as Islam and Christianity, or political ideologies such as liberalism and communism—in order to identify the roots of social behavior.

In religion, Islam and Christianity both possess forms specific to the nation. The people’s popular Islam and Christianity are not far removed from the ancient indigenous beliefs of Filipinos.

In politics, despite revolutionary changes, equivalent concepts of the nation exist throughout the archipelago: ili in Ilocano and Ifugao, balen in Pampanga, banua in Bicol and in various Visayan and other languages.

The meaning of nation does not refer only to a geographical place, but also to a community. The space of each territory can be understood through three characteristics:

1. A gathering of people in a center or settlement and in the surrounding places.
2. A broad space over which political control is exercised.
3. A degree of ethnolinguistic unity, such as among Tagalogs, Ibanags, or Maranaos.

A person might consequently be Sugboanon, Visayan, and Filipino at the same time.

These are examples of connections among ethnolinguistic developments founded on the pantayong perspective of indigenous culture or kalinangang bayan.

In intellectual life, one can examine such properly Filipino concepts as sandugo, kadugo, angkan, lipi, and lahi. Much has been written about utang na loob, or the debt of gratitude, and about pakikisama, which forms part of socialization.

I have recently examined connections between the self and the environment by studying mentalities expressed through concepts such as sarili and kapuwa.

Classifications of shared lexical fields reveal realities connecting different ethnolinguistic groups. One example is the conceptual distinction among rice in the field, palay; rice in storage, bigas; and cooked rice on the table, kanin. Such distinctions indicate that the concept of rice possesses deep connections to the Filipino world.

Regrettably, Filipino intellectuals give little attention to this kind of study. It is nevertheless necessary to attend to and preserve the pantayong perspective that formed our way of seeing the world.

Within ethnolinguistic kalinangan, a form of social understanding became rooted in opposition to the national culture the elite created from foreign borrowings.

Whereas elite culture was expressed in Spanish during the Propaganda period and the following decades, and in English in the present, indigenous or people’s culture developed the Filipino language from Tagalog.

In the natural course of acculturation involving every ethnolinguistic group, only Tagalog developed to a level capable of serving the nation as a whole in relation to the colonial system. This does not mean that Tagalog possesses better capacities than the other Philippine languages. All are relatively equal in their evolution from the Austronesian language continuum.

Rather, Tagalog was the language most exposed to international influence because it was spoken at the center of colonial power. This exposure decisively influenced its development to the present and gave Tagalog a particular capacity to confront historical changes and reflect more deeply the soul of the people.

That soul came to distinguish the spirit of the Filipino people as a whole. Tagalog consequently became identified with the Filipino people in opposition to the foreign-language national culture.

The culture of the social masses challenges the national culture imposed by the elite. Its strength can be demonstrated by several factors.

The first is that, because of national poverty, the American educational system accepted by the elite has not been effective. Foreign influence is therefore clearly visible only in certain private schools.

Two studies support this argument. The first, conducted by Doronila of the University of the Philippines as a master’s thesis in education, demonstrated that most young students from privileged classes preferred to possess a foreign nationality rather than be Filipino.

The second, undertaken by Professor Zarco of the University of the Philippines as a master’s study in sociology and philosophy, demonstrated that urban children admired famous Filipinos—such as the actor and model Fernando Poe, Jr.—and products such as shoes made in Marikina more than they admired “imported” celebrities and products.

In addition to the separation between private and public schools, the poverty of the people prevents many students from completing primary education. The gulf between the elite and uneducated youth consequently becomes wider.

This environment is the second factor limiting the effectiveness of national culture. National culture has transformed the Filipino environment, and the elite continually attempts to remain connected to Western culture and civilization through books, films, television, English-language magazines, and other forms. Spanish has almost disappeared, leaving only aristocratic traces.

Nevertheless, the environmental capacity of the Filipino has proven exceptionally strong and deeply rooted in history.

The environment leads to the third factor, through which people are arranged within a social continuity. Forms of discrimination are eventually absorbed into the natural development of society. Bakya and popular culture ultimately acquire their form and character as elements of the Filipino world.

A final factor is that society eventually recognizes the prejudices and superficiality of elite culture as cultural forms lacking seriousness and critical judgment. Elite culture consequently loses credibility as a model for everyone.

It would be valuable in this context to study how such cultural inadequacy is reflected in cinema and literature, particularly in comedy films.

These arguments present us with two concepts: indigenous or people’s culture, kalinangang bayan, and national culture, kulturang nasyonal. They exist within our theory of Pantayong Pananaw and within the challenge of developing a civilizational future in the Philippines.

In my opinion, the Western-created national culture and its prejudices should not form the basis of national participation in globalization. We must instead be grounded in the indigenous culture capable of giving us the viewpoint of our own identity and conception of the world—a pantayong perspective—as the indispensable condition of a civilizational discourse.

CONCLUSION

The pantayong perspective represents a comprehensive discourse concerning the civilizational development of a people. It explains specific aspects of how a human community united by one language and culture interprets its environment and reality.

During the historical development of the Filipino people, the pantayong perspective encountered Hispanic culture as part of the European civilization of the sixteenth century.

From the relationship between Filipinos and Spaniards in the Tagalog region emerged the ladinos, who would later develop into the ilustrados. These intellectual and social groups forged the birth of a national culture whose principal perspective was pangkami, determined by the anxieties and constraints of colonialism, even though it emerged with the desire to recover the primordial “indigenous” soul.

It was natural that, because pangkami was the ilustrado’s perspective in relation to Westerners, the ilustrado should attempt to create a pantayong perspective capable of sustaining national ambitions. Yet this was attempted through a national culture borrowed from foreigners.

In this process, the ilustrados genuinely wished to embrace the Filipino as a whole and differentiate the Filipino from the Spaniard. They attempted to prove that Filipinos could equal foreigners by using the foreigners’ own culture, overcoming the theoretical charge of Filipino incapacity and backwardness.

The elite was therefore formed through history, while Philippine society and culture were likewise products of historical creation.

Kalinangang bayan and its pantayong perspective became rooted within every Filipino and every Philippine community through our history. The best thing to occur during the past four hundred years has been the relationship among the different cultures and civilizations of the archipelago.

Kalinangang bayan must form the basis of a “national civilization,” or Kabihasnang pangbansa, because it reflects the pantayong perspective possessed by the Filipino people: the cosmos inherent in the Filipino way of understanding the world.

Indeed, kalinangang bayan should embrace the national culture or kulturang nasyonal as though the two were one. In practice, kalinangang bayan will eventually merge with national culture to create the comprehensive civilization of the Filipino people.

National culture will then serve as a mirror directed outward, while indigenous culture, rooted in the different ethnolinguistic groups, will serve as a mirror directed inward.

The interaction of these elements within a pantayong perspective, using our own language, will give us originality as both a nation and a civilization.

We are witnessing only the beginning of the fusion between national culture and indigenous culture, between kulturang nasyonal and kalinangang bayan.

The most important task is to make Filipino the medium of the educational system. It must become a standardized instrument capable of conveying every field of knowledge, transmitting abilities, and sharing ideas in a common Filipino language.

This will give the civilizational foundation solidity and coherence, and the cultural gulf will disappear.

Filipino must also become the official language of government, the communications media, and new technologies.

President Aquino established a program to expand Filipino in the public media, including a policy under which 85 percent of radio broadcasting would be in Filipino, while also improving the national language’s presence on television.

The dissemination of Filipino has nevertheless not been entirely successful, as demonstrated by the disappearance of the only serious Filipino-language newspaper, Diyaryong Filipino. It was replaced by the high-circulation Fil-mag in 1997.

There are also many popular tabloids in our language, while English-language newspapers must print interviewees’ responses in Tagalog so that ordinary people can understand them.

Books, newspapers, and the magazine Liwayway are published in Filipino. Ateneo has undertaken a project to publish novels in Filipino. A commercial press specializing in suspense and detective novels also exists.

More important than all of this is making Filipino the language of teaching, research, and scientific publication in universities.

This is being achieved at major universities in Manila, especially the University of the Philippines, where Rector Abueva introduced a “Decalogue of the Language,” continued by Rector Javier. The Sentro ng Wikang Filipino, or Center for the Filipino Language, has also been strengthened.

Science must likewise be conducted in Filipino so that it can become part of society’s development. This would make possible the incorporation of new scientific paradigms and provide stimulus for creating and discovering new knowledge within our society and its different scientific traditions, whether in the pure sciences or the humanities.

This is already being pursued particularly in the social sciences, including history and psychology at the University of the Philippines.

All of this is only the beginning of a national civilization, a kabihasnang pangbansa, that will genuinely reflect our own point of view: Pantayong Pananaw.

NOTES

1. Zoilo M. Galang, ed., Encyclopedia of the Philippines: The Library of Philippine Literature, Art and Science, Manila: P. Vera, 1935–1937, 10 volumes.
2. Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988.
3. Ahmed Ibn Parfahn, Malayan Grandeur: A Narrative of History by a Hundred Seers, and Our Intellectual Revolution, Cotabato: High School Press, 1957.
4. Translated directly from Filipino into Spanish by Jeannifer Zabala and Isaac Donoso, from Zeus A. Salazar, “Ang Pantayong Pananaw Bilang Diskursong Pangkabihasnan,” in Atoy Navarro, Mary Jane Rodriguez, and Vicente Villan, eds., Pantayong Pananaw: Ugat at Kabuluhan. Pambungad sa Pag-aaral ng Bagong Kasaysayan, Quezon City: Palimbagan ng Lahi, 2000, pp. 79–125.

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Main Highlights and Important Cautions

by Geronimo Cristobal

Pantayong Pananaw is not simply a nationalist viewpoint but an internal discourse conducted by members of a community among themselves through concepts, assumptions, memories, and meanings already shared within a common language and culture. Salazar describes it as a perspective arising “from us, about us, and for us.” What matters is not merely that Filipinos produce the scholarship, but that its intellectual framework emerges from their own linguistic and historical world. The distinctions among pantayo, pangkami, pansila, and pangkayo therefore express different relationships between speakers, audiences, and objects of knowledge. Pantayo refers to a conversation among members of the same community, including the audience; pangkami describes speaking about oneself to outsiders; pansila concerns speaking about “them”; and pangkayo involves addressing outsiders about their own group or character. Salazar argues that much Philippine historiography remains pangkami because Filipinos explain the Philippines to foreign audiences through foreign languages and intellectual categories rather than participating in an internal national conversation.

Language, in this framework, is not simply a vehicle for transmitting information but the structure through which a society connects meanings and understands its historical experience. Scholarship written by Filipinos in English is therefore not automatically pantayo. When it addresses foreigners or an Anglophone elite and remains dependent on Western categories, it continues to operate as pangkami. Salazar consequently calls for Filipino to become a language of government, education, research, scientific publication, and technology. A genuinely national pantayong pananaw, he argues, cannot be fully established while the state and the academy operate primarily in a language inaccessible to much of the population.

Salazar does not claim that a unified Filipino nation existed before Spanish colonization. Before the colonial period, separate ethnolinguistic communities possessed their own forms of pantayong pananaw. The national community emerged through colonial history, particularly through the Spanish-speaking ladinos, secular priests, and ilustrados. The contradiction is that the Filipino nation was conceptualized through foreign languages and ideas. The Propagandists defended Filipinos against colonial denigration, but they did so in Spanish, before Spanish and European audiences, and through European liberal concepts. Their discourse was therefore primarily pangkami, even when it contributed to the development of Filipino national consciousness.

Salazar traces the formation of the Filipino elite through a provocative genealogy extending from ladinos and secular priests to ilustrados, pensionados, Fulbright and Monbusho scholars, and modern intellectuals. Each generation acquired authority through mastery of a foreign language, educational system, and cultural standard. This historical process produced a persistent desire to demonstrate that Filipinos could equal foreigners and an obsession with identifying the “first Filipino” to achieve something already recognized and validated elsewhere. In Salazar’s account, Filipino work is too often valued only after receiving foreign approval. He applies this criticism not only to establishment intellectuals but also to many revolutionary and left-wing thinkers, whose political differences may nevertheless remain articulated through imported ideological categories.

Central to the essay is the distinction between kulturang nasyonal and kalinangang bayan. Kulturang nasyonal, or national culture, refers to the elite culture formed through Spanish and American colonial institutions. It operates largely through foreign languages and is closely connected to the state, universities, political authority, and international recognition. Kalinangang bayan, by contrast, refers to the historically rooted cultural world of the people, expressed through Philippine languages, ethnolinguistic traditions, popular religion, social relationships, and concepts such as kapuwa, sarili, utang na loob, pakikisama, lahi, and angkan. Salazar does not argue that elite national culture should simply be rejected. Instead, he proposes a fusion in which kalinangang bayan becomes the foundation of a broader national civilization while useful elements of kulturang nasyonal are absorbed into it.

The local ethnolinguistic community therefore serves as the starting point of the nation. Tagalog, Tausug, Waray, Bicolano, Ilocano, Maranao, Kalinga, and other communities each possess their own internal perspectives. A national pantayong pananaw must emerge through connections among these communities rather than through the imposition of a foreign-language elite culture. Salazar treats these identities as nested rather than mutually exclusive: a person may simultaneously be Sugboanon, Visayan, and Filipino. The national perspective should consequently develop from the convergence of existing ethnolinguistic worlds.

Salazar explains Tagalog’s national position historically rather than as the result of any inherent linguistic superiority. Tagalog acquired particular capacities because it was spoken at the center of colonial power and consequently experienced the most sustained contact with international and colonial influences. Filipino, developed from Tagalog, is presented as the language best positioned to challenge the foreign-language institutions of the state. Salazar nevertheless maintains that all Philippine languages possess broadly equal foundations within the Austronesian linguistic continuum.

Some of the essay’s sharpest claims concern what Salazar calls the Filipino elite’s “cultural schizophrenia.” The elite speaks Philippine languages to secure political support but writes laws in English, maintains a provincial identity while living in Manila or abroad, and claims indigenous roots while remaining detached from the lives and cultural experiences of ordinary Filipinos. His criticism applies to both conservative and left-wing intellectuals. Because each side frequently relies on imported ideological languages, their conflicts may reproduce struggles originating in Europe, the United States, Russia, or China rather than arising from Philippine historical experience.

The essay’s ultimate objective is the creation of a kabihasnang pangbansa, or Filipino national civilization. Salazar does not advocate cultural isolation or a return to an untouched precolonial past. He acknowledges that Philippine history was formed through encounters among different cultures and civilizations and describes these interactions as among the most productive developments of the past four centuries. His aim is to integrate foreign and elite forms of knowledge into a framework grounded in the languages, concepts, and historical experiences of the Filipino people. In this formulation, national culture would serve as a mirror directed outward, while kalinangang bayan would provide the inward-facing mirror through which Filipinos understand themselves.

The essay should nevertheless be approached as a programmatic and polemical intervention rather than as a neutral account of Philippine intellectual history. Its oppositions between elite and people, foreign and indigenous, and kulturang nasyonal and kalinangang bayan are deliberately sharp and sometimes treat internally diverse communities as coherent blocs. The Spanish translation also contains apparent chronological problems, including references to a “war of 1876” and an “Aguinaldo revolution in December 1879.” Because these formulations appear in the supplied text, they should be checked against Salazar’s original Filipino essay before being quoted in academic work.

The essay’s most productive claim is that the language, audience, and conceptual structure of scholarship determine whose historical consciousness it serves. For Salazar, it is not enough to write about Filipinos. The more important question is whether Filipinos are addressing one another through concepts that have become intelligible within their own shared linguistic and historical world.