The Age of Globalization

Anarchists and the Anticolonial Imagination

Benedict Anderson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781781681442
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781685075
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The exchange of ideas makes history as surely as the exchange of gunfire. The Age of Globalization (previously published as Under Three Flags) is an account of the unlikely connections that made up late nineteenth-century politics and culture. In particular, Benedict Anderson examines the links between militant anarchists in Europe and the Americas and the anti-imperialist uprisings in Cuba, China, and Japan. Told through the complex intellectual interactions of two great Filipino writers-the political novelist Jos? Rizal and the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes-The Age of Globalization is a brilliantly original work on how global networks shaped the nationalist movements of the time.

Prologue: The Rooster’s Egg

In 1887, at the Exposición Filipina in Madrid, a 23-year-old indio named Isabelo de los Reyes, living in colonial Manila, won a silver medal for a huge Spanish-language manuscript which he called El folk-lore filipino. He published this text in unwitting tandem with compatriot José Rizal (then aged twenty-five), who, after wandering around Northern Europe for some time, published his incendiary first novel, Noli me tangere, in Berlin that self-same year. This book helped earn him martyrdom in 1896 and, later, the permanent status of Father of His Country and First Filipino.

Who was Isabelo?¹

He was born on July 7, 1864 in the still-attractive northern Luzon archiepiscopal coastal town of Vigan—which faces Vietnam across the South China Sea—to parents of the Ilocano ethnic group, the vast majority of whom were, in those days, illiterate. His mother Leona Florentino, however, was evidently a poet of some quality, so that at the Madrid and later expositions her poetry was displayed for Spaniards, Parisians, and people in St Louis.² This accomplishment did not save her marriage, and the six-year-old Isabelo was entrusted to a rich relative, Mena Crisólogo, who later put him into the grammar school attached to the local seminary run by the Augustinians. It appears that abusive behavior by the Peninsular Spanish friars aroused in the boy a hatred of the Catholic religious Orders which persisted all his life and had serious consequences for his career. In 1880, aged sixteen, he escaped to Manila, where he quickly acquired a BA at the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán; after that, he studied law, history and palaeography at the ancient (Dominican) Pontifical University of Santo Tomás, then the only university in all of East and Southeast Asia.

Isabelo de los Reyes (seated, right).

Binondo Square in Manila, circa 1890.

Meanwhile, Isabelo’s father had died, and the boy, obliged now to support himself, plunged into the burgeoning world of journalism, contributing to most of Manila’s newspapers, and in 1889 even publishing his own, El Ilocano, said to be the first-ever solely in a Philippine vernacular. But while still a teenager, Isabelo read an appeal in Manila’s Spanish-language newspaper La Oceanía Española (founded in 1877) asking readers to contribute articles to develop a new science, named el folk-lore, followed by a simple sketch of how this was to be done. He immediately contacted the Spanish editor, who gave him a collection of “folk-lore books” and asked him to write about the customs of his native Ilocos. Two months later Isabelo set to work, and soon thereafter started publishing—not merely on Ilocos, but also on his wife’s township of Malabon, on the outskirts of Manila, on the Central Luzon province of Zambales, and in general terms, what he called el folk-lore filipino. It became one of the great passions of his life.

THE NEW SCIENCE

The question, naturally, is why? What was the meaning of el folk-lore for a clerically educated native youth in the 1880s? Much can be learned from the Introduction and first pages of his youthful masterwork.³ There Isabelo described folk-lore, albeit with some hesitation, as a ciencia nueva (a new science), perhaps consciously echoing Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova, which, thanks to the efforts of Michelet and others, had burst on the trans-European scene in the mid-nineteenth century. Isabelo explained to his readers, in both the Philippines and Spain, that the word “folk-lore”—which he translated ingeniously as el saber popular—had only been invented in 1846 by the English antiquarian William Thoms, in an article published in the London Athenaeum. The first folk-lore society in the world had been organized in London as recently as 1878—a mere six years before he started his own research.⁴ The French had followed suit nationally only in 1886—just as Isabelo was starting to write. The Spanish typically had been caught intellectually napping; when their turn came, they had no thought but to incorporate the Anglo-Saxon coinage into Castilian as el folk-lore. Isabelo was starting to position himself alongside pioneering Britain, above and ahead of the tag-along Peninsular metropole. He was like a fast surfer on the crest of the wave of world science’s beetling progress, something never previously imaginable for any native of what he himself called this “remote Spanish colony on which the light of civilization only tenuously shines.”⁵ This position he reinforced in several instructive ways.

On the one hand, he was quick to mention in his Introduction that some of his research had already been translated into German—then the language of advanced scholarly thinking—and published in Ausland and Globus, which he claimed were the leading European organs in the field. El folk-lore filipino also judiciously discussed the opinions of leading Anglo-Saxon contemporaries on the status of the ciencia nueva, politely suggesting that they were more serious than those of Peninsular Spanish folkloristas. He must also have enjoyed commenting that “Sir George Fox” had been in conceptual error by confusing folklore with mythology, and some Castilian contemporaries had been in similar error by muddling mythology and theogony.⁶

On the other hand, the newness of this ciencia had a special colonial aspect to it, which he did not hesitate to underline. He dedicated his book to “Los folkloristas españoles de la Peninsula, que me han dispensado toda clase de atenciones” (the Spanish folklorists of the Peninsula, who have tendered me every manner of consideration). Isabelo’s Introduction spoke warmly of “colleagues” in Spain—the boards of directors of the journals El Folk-Lore Español and the Boletín de la Enseñanza Libre de Madrid in the imperial capital, and the Boletín Folklórico in Seville—who had kept him abreast of research in the Peninsula that ran parallel to his own work.

The Peninsularity—so to speak—of these colleagues was regularly underlined, as well as the Peninsularity of their research. Without explicitly saying so, Isabelo (rightly) insinuated that no colonial Spaniards or creoles were doing anything comparable in the Philippines. This suggestion, of course, permitted him to position himself as a far-ahead-of-the-colonial-masters pioneer of the new universal science. To explain this peculiar situation Isabelo resorted to an ingenious device—certainly made necessary by the violent, reactionary character of the clerically dominated colonial regime of the time. He described a series of courtly exchanges he had had in the Manila press with a liberal-minded (almost certainly Peninsular) medical doctor and amateur litterateur, who had contributed to local newspapers under the pen name Astoll.⁷ This move allowed him to quote the Peninsular as admiring Isabelo’s courage and imagination but feeling deeply pessimistic about his chances of success in the face of the overwhelming indifference, indolence, and mental stupor in the colony. “Here the only things that grow luxuriantly are cogon grass and molave—two tenacious local weeds.”⁸ And when Astoll finally broke off their exchange in despair, Isabelo, who had indirectly raised the question of why “certain corporations” (meaning the Orders) had contributed nothing, commented that in the circumstances “prudence warrants no other course.” Into the mental darkness of the colonial regime, then, Isabelo saw himself as bringing the light of modern Europe.

Newness came in still another guise in El folk-lore filipino, and this was related to the idea of ciencia. The Introduction contains a most interesting discussion of the larger debate on the scientific status of folklore studies. Isabelo had fun noting that one faction of the Peninsular folkloristas was so impatient to turn el folk-lore into a theoretical science that its members soon could no longer understand one another—opening the way for a much-needed international discussion, in which the Anglo-Saxons appeared both more modest and more practical. At the other extreme were those Spanish folklorists who were merely sentimental collectors of vanishing customs and conceptions for some future museum of the past. Isabelo made clear what he himself thought folklore was about, and how he saw its social value. In the first place, it offered an opportunity for a reconstruction of the indigenous past that was impossible in the Philippines by any other means, given the absence of pre-Spanish monuments or inscriptions, and, indeed, the near-absence of written records. (When Rizal tried to do the same thing later, he saw no other way to proceed than to read between the lines of the work of the best of the Spanish administrators of the early Conquest era.) Serious research on customs, beliefs, superstitions, adages, tongue-twisters, incantations and so on would throw light on what he referred to as the “primitive religion” of the pre-Spanish past. But—and here the young Ilocano sharply distinguished himself from amateur costumbristas—he also underlined the importance of comparisons. He confessed that before the completion of his research he had been sure that the neighboring Tagalogs and Ilocanos were razas distintas (distinct races) on account of their different languages, physiognomies, behavior and so on. But comparison had proved to him that he had been wrong and that the two ethnicities clearly derived from a single source. The implication of the title El folk-lore filipino was that further research would show that all the indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago had a common origin, no matter how many languages they now spoke or how different their present customs and religious affiliations. All this meant that, contra the colony’s clerical historiographers, who began their narratives with the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest, the real history of the archipelago and its pueblo/pueblos (here he hesitated often) stretched far further back in time, and thus could not be framed by coloniality.

THE RICHES OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

On the other hand—and here Isabelo radically distanced himself from many of his Peninsular colleagues—the new science could not and should not be confined to sentimental excavations of the quaint. El folk-lore filipino is above all the study of the contemporary, in particular what he had termed el saber popular. (Today, we would use the term “local knowledge”.) This saber was real knowledge, not “lore,” with its musty, antiquarian connotations. He offered the hypothetical example of a selvaje (wild man, perhaps a savage) in the forests near his home region of South Ilocos who might any day (accidentally, Isabelo said) discover that a certain local fruit provided a better antidote to the cholera bacillus than that currently manufactured at the instance of the Spanish medical scientist Dr Ferran.⁹ The framing for such claims was the absence of serious scientific knowledge about almost everything in the Philippines. For example, Flora de Filipinas, a new compilation by some Augustinian friars, was very far from complete.¹⁰ The indigenes had a much deeper knowledge of medicinal plants, of flora and fauna, of soils and climatic variations than did the colonialists, and this huge reservoir of knowledge, contained in the saber popular, was still unknown to the world. The Philippines thus appeared not merely as a region containing a mass of exotica unknown to Europeans, but also as the site for a significant future contribution to mankind, springing from what the common people knew, in their own languages, but of which Spanish had no conception. It was exactly the “unknownness” of the Philippines that gave its folklore a future-oriented character that was necessarily absent in the folklore of Peninsular Spain. It was also, however, the living specificity of the Philippines that positioned it to offer something, parallel and equal to that of any other país, to humanity. This is the logic that would much later make the United Nations both possible and plausible. So far, so clear. Too clear, probably. For Isabelo’s text, under the bright lights of its major themes, is not without its shadowy complications. We might provisionally think about them under three rubrics.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Prologue: The Rooster’s Egg
• 2. Allá … Là-bas
• 3. In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel
• 4. Trials of a Novelist
• 5. Montjuich
• Postscript
• Bibliography