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HI165

Kasaysayan - may say say ( something significant or important)

“Gendered”
- History is somehow patriarchal
- History has to be documented

Scientific
- Has to have some sort of scientific basis

Tripartite

- 3 periods
Pre-spaniard
During the spaniard period
Post-spaniard
- Rizal
Brightness (Liwanag)
Darkness (Dilim)
Brightness (Liwanag)

“We had a great civilisation prior to the spaniards”

Rizal was arguing that despite the darkening of the spaniard colonization, our culture
survived. Our language survived compared to other cultures.

Filipino perspectives

Towards a Peoples History

By training, Filipino historians were captives of Spanish and American historiography, both
of which inevitably viewed Philippine history through the prism of their own prejudices.

Spaniards viewed themselves as saviors towards the Filipinos

Americans viewed themselves as big brothers to the Filipinos

This means that the principal focus must be the anonymous masses of individuals and on the
social forces generated by their collective lives and struggles.
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For history, through it is commonly defined as the story of man, is not the story of man the
individual but man the collective, that is, associated man.

Without society there can be no history and there are no societies without man.

An individual has no history apart from society, and society the historical product of people
in struggle.

Thematic view - viewing history collectively, as opposed to the achievements of individuals.

History, the, is the recorded struggle of people for ever increasing freedom and for newer and
higher realisations of the human person. But the struggle is a collective one and as such
involves the mass of human beings who are therefore motivators of change and of history.

Antiquarian - focuses on the past.

Historian - explaining the present through the past.

History is not merely a chronology of events; it is not the story of heroes and great men.
Essentially, history consists of the people’s efforts to attain a better life.

Philippine history is a progressive perspective

Chinese history has a concept of cyclical perspective - dynasty successions

The people should also have their history for they have made history through their
participation in mass actions resulting in the unfolding of the social forms that seek to realise
their goals. But in the record pages of history they have remained in the background, as
if they had played only a negligible role. It is those who rule who have had their names and
exploits emblazoned on these pages. The people have been taken for granted and their
role has been minimized or even denied.

Superman may exist in romantic minds or among those who persist in the primitive practice
of deifying men; but no superman exist, one leaders who became great because they were
working with and for the people.

It is true that the inarticulate as individuals cannot have their deeds recorded in history.
However, these collective effort can be and should be chronicled and given its deserved
importance.
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In people’s history, individuals, events, and institutions as particularities will be seen their
proper perspective within the particularities be fully understood. At the same time, only by
correctly understanding these particularities will the general patterns of evolving history of
the people be fully comprehended.

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National Narratives
Resil Mojares

• Anything processed by memory is fiction

• Any memorable testimony about the past is mediated by the subjectivity of a narrator
and shaped in a narrative constructs, stories designed to yield meaning through a particular
way of ordering events in time and space
• Corroboration - corroborated with other news or events to prevent a false narrative.
• How national narratives are generated and constructed and how they become
authoritative and ‘national’ unmasks the relations of power in which they are grounded.
• To narrate the past is to stake out a claim against indeterminacy and such
indeterminacy hounds the narration as part of its condition.
• Exclusions destabilise the national narrative’s claim to wholeness.
• ‘Decentering’ moves will be deployed to free the past from the hegemonic claims of
narrative itself.

Decenter - going beyond the mainstream perspective

Aug 22,
Multi- Culturalist History
- 3 groups in the Philippines
o Chinese, Singapore, Malaysians (?)
o Dominant Christians
 Political: the incumbent power structure is controlled by rural warlords
and family dynasties in towns and provinces throughout the Philippine
archipelago
 Economic: there is the dilemma of widespread rural and urban poverty
 Social: there is inequality and class diversity into upper, middle and
lower classes, between the “Haves” and the “Have- nots” in society.
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 given this situation: the unjust, oppressive and iniquitous conditions as

well as structures have bred popular forms of protest, such as outright
banditry, millenarianism and revolution
o non- dominant cultural communities
 the indigenous upland inhabitants, not to mention the Muslims, have
come to be considered as outsiders by those claiming ethnic and
cultural dominance in the Christianized lowlands and coastal areas
 Muslims
 Lumads
o The tragedy is that the Christianized lowland Filipinos have stereotyped them
as inferior and relegated them to the margins of existence and the underclass
of Philippine society As a result they have been branded even as non-
Filipinos. Is it any surprise them that they have taken the countervailing option
of liberation from the Philippine nation- stat

- IP’s in the Philippines:

- 14-17M indigenous Peoples inhabit the Philippines, 170 different languages, 110
ethno- linguistic communities
- 6% in Visayas, 33% in Luzon, 61% Mindanao

- Possible Approaches toward unity of the Nation- State

o Assimilation A+B+C= A
o Amalgamation A+B+C = D
o Multi- Culturalism A+B+C= ABC
o A= Christians, B= Muslims, C= Lumads

- We must give special attention to the role and contribution of the marginalized and
inarticulate sectors of our society today. Their deeds, their words, their problems. And
their aspirations need to be documented and articulated and placed in the proper
context of the destiny of the national community

Veneration Without Understanding

Hero Worship
- Must be both historical and critical
- We must always be conscious of the historical conditions and circumstances that
made an individual hero, and we must always be ready to admit that heero’s
applicability ceases to be of current value
- To allow hero- worship to be uncritical and unhistorical is to distort the meaning of
heroic individual’s life, and to encourage a cult benefit of historical meaning- a cult
of the the individual shorn of his historical significance. It is form without content
a fad that can be used for almost anything because it is really nothing
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Rizal and the Philippine Revolution
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