Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

Knowledge Diversity

Just days before the General Conference of UNESCO adopted the Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions, the 49-member Philippine presidential consultative commission on constitutional amendments unanimously resolved to propose the removal of a provision in the Philippine Constitution that prohibits foreigners from owning and controlling media firms in the country. In a newspaper report, Biliran Mayor Gerry Espina said, “you cannot regulate technology. We really want to open access to information which should not be controlled by locals alone.” Commission member Alexander Magno added that deleting the provision “will make business more efficient and this will regulate the content. In a multimedia world, you can’t tie up content with ownership. This would ensure that media as a business is contestable in the market, so that monopoly would be eliminated.” He called the specific general provision of the Philippine Constitution a “stupid provision” wherein the country “lost investments in the past because of this constitutional inhibition.”

Apparently, these gentlemen were well-meaning, so well-meaning in fact, that their remarks vividly demonstrate the gravity by which human intelligence has become so undermined by the rhetorics of pure market ideology such that basic definitions of concepts as “media”, “technology”, “information”, “ownership” and “content” are confused and muddled with corrupted notions of “multimedia”, “market” and “monopoly.”

Inspired by current altruisms of “international cooperation” and a “multimedia world”, the mendicant and obsequious thinking that accounts for much of social and economic problems - whether in the Philippines or the global South - may also be attributed to the long historical process of colonialism and imperialism. American media, way back in 1898, published an article called “The Philippines and trade”, clearly describing how through “inter-oceanic processes” the machinery of neocolonialism became embedded into civic consciousness:

“Our (the U.S.) commercial development, following the course of our territorial expansion, logically and inevitably, has expanded the vigor of our growth function internally, between the two oceans rather than externally upon either; but this inter-oceanic process having completed the subjugation of the obstacles to it, the energies of national growth became freed to operate upon new fields of activity… The extremities of the hardships to be endured, or the terrors or dangers to be confronted, do not enter into the national question of expansion at all [but rather] the outflow of national energy obeyed the laws implanted in the national organization as blindly and instinctively as do the swallows the laws of their migration.” (Quoting from the article “The Philippines and Trade” published in The Freedom, 5 November 1898, in Cracks in the Parchment Curtain and Other Essays in Philippine History, by William Henry Scott. (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1982), pp. 289-290.)

Often, culture and ecology are seen as obstacles to commercial development, and their subjugation throughout colonial history - from military force and financial power, to the image and symbolic industries - has consistently been comprised of the alienation of the mental from the physical, of content from carriage, of theory from practice. Thus, it is not surprising that in recent events, the U.S. ambassador to UNESCO, had to remind everyone that the UNESCO was intended to be the intellectual balance to the Marshall Plan, a massive Post-War economic aid given by the U.S. to favored countries in Western Europe, in particular as reward to those embracing capitalism and rejecting communism. The Marshall Plan was selective aid, U.S. financial power, determined to complete U.S. economic and cultural imperialism after the War. As “intellectual balance” to financial and political dominance, the diversity of cultural expressions is being destroyed in order to stimulate demand for their re-creation as merchandise.

The adoption of the UNESCO Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions is considered by many a moral victory. But it is only one step towards the resurgence of a dialectic that has been subjugated by globalisation’s obsession with a U.S.-style mono-culture that sees everything in terms of business markets. The result of two years intense debates and negotiations, the Convention now places upon audiovisual services and information services the status of heritage and contemporary activity, or what the UNESCO calls “two pillars of culture.” This means that media and information are specific cultural expressions to which countries have the sovereign right to nurture and protect beyond the demands of trade. However, it is also often the sovereign right of states that reinforce the trafficking of culture as commodity in compliance with “free trade” agreements. Thus, states may have the potential to exclude cultural policy from “free trade” agreements, just as they can invoke “media diversity” in support of foreign ownership and control of media.

The relationship between people and state constitutes a social contract, a covenant whereby people have surrendered some of their rights to the institutions of government. It is a contract of such pernicious consequence that it must bear an organic nature, always subject to a vigilant people’s conceptualisations of development. If the UNESCO Convention seeks to reaffirm links between culture, development and dialog, and such links are potentially left to the sovereign right of states to elaborate, then the spirit of the state’s covenant with its people must demand that its cultural policies be articulated in view of indigenous/populist rather than primarily national or international welfare: Welfare within a culturally specific context, through genuine and open dialog, and in terms of an indigenous development paradigm that is outside imperialistic models usually defined within the narrow realms of global consumerist culture.

Fatima Lasay / Quezon City, Philippines, November 2005

Language Rites/Rights

A concept of language in Filipino is expressed in the words “wika” and “salita” - and both words roughly translate to the English word language. Wika is traceable to sanskrit meaning family, home, or clan. Salita has more complicated (but less fluid) morphological etymon that translate roughly to word, expression, speech, narration, language, dialect, manner of speaking. In use, salita means bukal ng tunog, ritmo, lirisismo, imahe, taling-haga (bukal=natural, inherent) (ng=of) (tunog=sound) (ritmo=rhythm) (lirismo=lyricism, song) (imahe=image) (talin-haga=allegory, metaphor, misteryo).

My definition of thought (and thinking) in Filipino is expressed as “diwa” and “isip.” Diwa roughly translate to thought and isip roughly translate to thinking. Both diwa and isip have multiple meanings.

Diwa is sense (bait, sintido, isip), consciousness (pamatyag = tool for observation) (kalibutan, sankalibutan = universe; Malay/Indonesian kesadaran), gist (buod, sumaryo, kahulugan (meaning) (Malay/Indonesian = pokok), meaning, substance contained (laman, isi), spirit (espirituwal, hilagyo, kalag) (Ind/Malay=djiwa, budi), soul, life or vital principal (kaluluwa), idea (haka; Ind/Malay=faham/Filipino-paham).

Isip is related to a process of thought (pag-iisip, kaisipan), understanding (unawa), sense, judgment (bait, sintido), criterion, opinion (palagay, opinyon), discernment (tingin, paningin), idea (hinagap, hagap, wari), ingenuity (alam, kapamaaranan), talent (talino, dunong), intention (tangka, balak), surmise (akala, haka), viewpoint (pananaw), and mind (which has an even more multiple meanings). Isip also is used in the word “isipan” which means “counting sticks” (noun) or palilyong pamilang.

Mind is “loob”, “pagkaloob”, “kalooban” roughly translating to: interior (Ind/Malay=dalam), courage, valor (Ind=keberanian, Malay = berani), will, volition, state of mind (Ind/Malay = kehendak).

Loob also has a morphological etymon which roughly translates to robbery, brigandage, a piece of fenced land, orchard, granary.

Language as Rite of the Babaylan

The complex relationships between diwa, wika and isip may be found in the ritual and philosophy of the babaylan/katalonan (whose role in Philippine society dates from pre-colonial period). All the babaylan are interconnected in a country itself and in the entirety of a region where a particular mythology is salient.

This interconnection is seen in the ritual of the babaylan, and there are many types of rituals, but central in all these is the relationship of the babaylan to the sun. The sun is central to mythologies (of god (Bathala), anito and diwata) and ethnolinguistic beliefs, and mythologies have a practical aspect as they are expressed into what is called a ritual. The ritual of the babaylan consists of observing the sun and movement - a ritual that is the source of dance, teatro, and all the artistic and literary forms.

Each babaylan holds together the physical, social, spiritual and psychological ties of each community, and the babaylan’s the babaylan’s inter-relating of soul and body/sensory within human - of being human) is important in this role and status in the community. Within the babaylan’s concept of being (of being human) are the dual concepts of the “intellectual” and the “sensorial” and both concepts further present dualisms as such:

1. Within kaluluwa=diwa (soul=consciousness): konseptong intelektuwal - isip/akala (thought/belief or presumption); dunong/alam (knowledge/sense or wisdom); talino/talisik (intellgience/erudition or deep learning); hulo/hula (deduction arrived through raciocination/prediction or conjecture).

2. Within ginhawa=damdam (spirit or freedom from want=feeling or sensing): Konseptong sensoryal - lasa/tikim (taste/to taste); kita/tingin (vision/to see); ulinig/dinig (something heard in passing/to listen).

In this complex, being is maintained or being is whole if the soul is attached to the body, but soul can be untied from the body. In Bisaya and Bikulano language, soul (kaluluwa) and untie (kalag) are synonymous. Soul (diwa) can be untied from body (ginhawa) when (From Z.A. Salazar, Ang Babaylan sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1999):

1. The person is asleep and dreaming
2. When the person is unconscious
3. When an infant or child is “having a tantrum”
4. When a person is sick In instances

1-4, the person, though dismembered of the soul, remains alive.

5. When a person dies - in this case the soul (diwa) becomes an anito (from animism, diwa becomes diwata), and spirit (ginhawa) is lost with the destruction of the body.

In this underlying complex of culture, language is at best manifested in ritual, and it is from ritual that all the arts are derived.

Language and Thought

Multiple perspectives may be crucial and “subversive”. I’d like to speculate that this may be called “doublethink” in Orwell’s ‘1984′, and in the context of “the great power in legal writing at the bar and bench” (from one of my old Anglo-Saxon law books), was used by the author to demonize “the enemy” (i.e. Communism). The author wrote: “But “political regeneration” for Orwell related to those who have been seduced by the Communist mythology and thus placed in danger of being encompassed by the life lived today by millions of our fellow human beings in Russia and China. Those were the issues before the (UN) General Assembly and, so far as can be observed, we in this country (America) were not divided about them.”

The author defined “doublethink” as the mental process by which a person could hold simultaneously in his mind two flat contradictions and believe both of them. And the author goes on to exemplify: “Mr. Khrushchev repeatedly exhibited his mastery of both of these arts (doublethink and newspeak); and Premier Castro showed a flair for them which, with a little hard work, could become a fully developed talent. When the latter talked of the American preference for “German warmongering” and “Japanese militarism” as against the wholly peaceful pre-occupation of East Germany and Communist China, he was double-thinking with a vengeance. And Mr. Khrushchev was projecting duality of thought into Newspeak when he said that NATO “has assumed the thankless mission of exercising the spirit of freedom wherever it appears on the globe.”

Then the author proceeds to demonstrate how a “focus upon facts and superior abilities for clarity and forcefulness of expression are required” to combat these (”doublethink” and “newspeak”) “methods of misrepresentation.” The author refers to Churchill and to Prime Minister Macmillan as “that highly literate man” who spoke to the (UN) General Assembly pitching before Communism “a formidable tradition of the effective use of the English tongue” in these words:

“For more than a century, it has been our purpose to guide out dependent territories toward freedom and independence. Since the Second World War, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Ghana, Malaya, comprising over 510,000,000 of peoples have, with our help, reached the goal of independent life and strength …”

Fatima Lasay / Quezon City, Philippines, December 2003

Medium-Body

All people have rituals. These are actions (rites) that follow a prescribed pattern and are believed to be highly efficacious. In rituals are dramatized, embodied and manifested the key beliefs of a people (and not just the individual) about the origins of the world, the meaning of life, and the ideal behavior of a human being. Many rituals intervene at the different stages of the life-cycle: birth, courtship, marriage, and death. They seek health for the child, success for the suitor, fertility for the spouse, and a smooth journey to the next world. Our rituals heal the sick and the dying. There are also rituals for everyday purposes: success in fishing and hunting; clearing the land of heavy, dangerous trees; an abundant harvest; house-building; and victory over enemies.

The most important aspect of a ritual is that it has a prescribed pattern and that it is believed to be highly efficacious. The presence of a prescription indicates the connection of a ritual with a tradition or a past, and the belief that a ritual is efficacious indicates the utility and need for the ritual to produce specific results. Because conditions and needs change in time and place, what is determined as efficacious also change. Therefore, rituals, though prescribed in some way, must also change or evolve.

To think of art as a ritual is to think of the artist as a cultural worker or a cultural producer or an active agent in the shaping of a culture. In the triad of datu, blacksmith and shaman, an artist can be one of these three important figures in society. As a datu, the artist may be concerned with how the art that he/she creates takes part in the political, economic and social conditions of a community and by extension, the world. As a blacksmith, the artist may be concerned with how the art that he/she creates takes part in tooling and re-tooling for political, economic and social use. As a shaman, the artist may be concerned with how the art that he/she creates takes part in threading the physical, social, spiritual and psychological ties of a community, and by extension, the world. In all these roles, rituals have been created, been used and continue to be created, used and evolved.

Of course, there is the idea of the artist (and of art) as being concerned only with itself, an internal dialogue answering only to its (art’s) own social and cultural demands. I think this happened when art historians and art theorists succeeded in validating “art for art’s sake” by using all the might of their theories and philosophies to reduce the visualized rituals in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira as purely non-functional non-ritualistic “useless” art. The same degeneration was done by scholars, historians, crystallographers, mathematicians, and theorists in the field of ornamental art, when in their own discourse, the symbolism, meaning and language was detached from the geometric forms found in Islamic art and architecture. Spirit degenerates into intellect.

Modern cultures have nurtured differences between the concepts of thinking and dreaming, ultimately, between positive knowledge and creative thought, science and art. When these differences have become so embedded in society such that one is privileged over the other, the strategy is not to stress that there is actually little difference between them, but to subtly enlarge the underprivileged until it overcomes the dominant concept (but instead of one overcoming the other, what is perceived is a transfusion).

But is it possible that even if Philippine contemporary art was shaped within the formalistic language of western art, it would still somehow possess that sensitivity and primal intelligence to respond to the needs and demands of the local situation - the local social, political, cultural and spiritual environment. I felt strongly about this because one of the students from Afghanistan said that the art that they were making, although only concerned with “art for art’s sake” would always be taken or perceived politically by the local people. It is a significant statement because it meant that the students could still discern an art that was merely an internal dialogue and an art that was a ritual with the world in which they live.

In the Philippine context, I would refer to social realism, that movement in the arts during the Marcos dictatorship, as a ritual. I look at it as a ritual against the “prettification” enforced by the regime upon all the arts through the might of their patronage and their goons. The Marcos propaganda of art as “the true, the good and the beautiful” for over 20 years was so powerful that it nurtured an art audience with a taste for western art - that is, an art that tells nothing of the actual conditions in which they lived. When Marcos was overthrown, social realism outgrew itself into the recovery of racial past, the healing of the long and sorrowful story of a race divided against itself under subjugation, and the forging of a strength against the neocolonial present that spawns ideologies that substitute matter for spirit, empty ritual for living memory. But unlike Afghanistan, whose people have cultivated a political perception of art, the Philippine audience for art remained in the claws of “the true, the good and the beautiful.” I think this is because the trauma of war in Afghanistan is physical and real, whereas in the Philippines, the assimilation has been benevolent, emotive and intellectual.

Fatima Lasay / Quezon City, Philippines, February 2004

Tungkol sa talaarawang Korakora: Knowledge, Language, Body
Fatima Lasay / Quezon City, Philippines, 2005

In the category “Knowledge” are theoretical writings, critiques and a variety of musings. In the category “Language” are remembrances of cultural encounters in various past travels. My artistic practice is logged in the category “Body.”

About Korakora: Knowledge, Body, Language

The image-concept keys in this website are [1] the female principle (as I see for instance in Esteban Villanueva’s painting of the Basi Revolt of 1807), [2] the pintados or tattooed people (depicted in the Boxer Codex) of the Visayas encountered by the Spaniards in the 16th century; and [3] the korakora, caracoa or the ancient plank-built boats of southeast Asia. These image-concepts give form and meaning to the aesthetic equilibrium of: [1] knowledge, [2] body and [3] language.

Knowledge-body-language make up life and life force, and within this triad is expressed computation on three levels: [1] the operation of the perceptive aparatus; [2] the translation of the environment into the cellular architecture; and [3] computation, learning and experience in the process of symbolization. I believe that these beautifully illustrate the relationship / balance between pure thought and sensible knowledge.

They make boats of wooden boards and fasten them with split rattan, and cotton wadding to plug up the seams. The hull is very flexible, and rides up and down the waves, and they row them with oars made of wood, too. None of them have ever been known to break up. - Wang Ta-Yuan, Tao I Chih Lueh, ch 45

Ang korakora o caracoa ay isang pagsasagisag na aking napiling kinatawan ng website na ito, bagamat ito’y isa lamang sa tatlong pagsasagisag. Ang papel ng bangka, pamamangka at pagbuo ng isang bangka ay mahalaga sa kalinangan at kasaysayan ng mga tao sa Timog-silangang Asya. Sa likhang-sining / kasulatang “Mga Anak ng Ubas / Enfants du raisin” (PDF, 1.72mb) ay aking itinalakay ang kapookan ng bangka sa kulturang Pilipino.

Ang larawan naman sa ibaba ay detalye mula sa pagpipinta ni Esteban Villanueva patungkol sa pag-aalsa ng mga Ilukano laban sa monopoly ng mga kastila sa alak (o basi) noong ika-labing-siyam na siglo. Ka-aya-ayang isipin ang pagsasagisag sa larawang ito — masdan ang pagkadambuhala ng mga kababaihan at ang pagka-dwende ng mga kalalakihan. Ano nga kaya ang kahulugan ng likas ng kababaihan (na likas di lamang sa mga babae kundi pati sa mga lalaki) sa mga unang siglo ng pagsakop ng mga kastila sa Pilipinas at sa mas laon pang mga panahon?

Ang serye ng Basi Revolt (ipininta nung 1807) ni Esteban Villanueva ay matatagpuan sa Burgos Museum, Vigan, Ilokos Sur. Ang reproduksyong ginamit sa webpage na ito ay mula sa “Art Philippines” (limbag 1992).

Ang pag-guhit, pagpinta, pagdibuho o pag-larawan ay mga teknolohiya ng pagsasagisag. Sa kabanatang “Tanáw: Seeing and Shaping the World in the Philippine Landscape” (PDF, 250kb) ay aking itinalakay ang pagkaka-iba-iba ng sistema ng pagsasagisag o representasyon, partikular sa pagpinta ng mga landscapes o tanawin. “Tanaw: Perspectives on the BSP Painting Collection” is available thru the BSP website.

Sa pagbubuod, ang tatlong larawan-konsepto na aking personal na kinagigiliwan at napiling tagapagtuos ng aking pangingisip bilang isang manlilikha ay ang mga larawan-konsepto ng [1] kababaihan, ng [2] pintado at ng [3] korakora. Para sa akin, ang larawan-konsepto ng kababaihan ay nagbibigay kahulugan at anyo sa elemento ng kaluluwa (knowledge); ang larawan-konsepto naman ng pintado ay nagbibigay kahulugan at anyo sa elemento ng katawan o ginhawa (body); samantala, ang larawan-konsepto ng korakora ang syang nagbibigay kahulugan at anyo sa elemento ng wika o pagsasagisag (language).

Sa aking palagay, ang kaluluwa-ginhawa-wika na syang bumubuo sa buhay (life) at bisa (life force) ay huwaran at halimbawa ng tinatawag na estetiko (aesthetics). Nakapaloob sa “triad” na ito ang pagtutumpak (computation) sa antas ng mga aparato sa pagdama, ng pagsalin ng mga katangian ng kapaligiran sa anyong nakapaloob sa kalamnan ng organismo, at sa kahulugan ng karanasan at pag-aaral sa mga prosesong ito. Ang katanungan patungkol sa palapamaraanan ng dunong, sintido at pagkalikhain ay nakabuod sa pagtutumpak na ito.

Dito ay aking napuna na hindi magkapareho ang pagtutumpak (o “computation” sa wikang ingles) at ang popular na terminong “new media.”

So, ano nga ba ang “new media”?

Mula sa isang interview ng Lumiere Reader: Taxonomies are always rather suspect because they inevitably impose a point of view. I have used the term “new media” in my work and writing in the past and in my experience it has been more restricting than helpful. Perhaps it was useful career-wise because it was like a passphrase, but in terms of the creative process, it was simply conceptually empty. Not because of elitism or meritocracy, but because of the (historical and cultural) dogmas embedded within it. Through the medium of language, we are able to internalize concepts and externalize them. “New media” is a term and system that simply does not fit in my triad of knowledge, body and language.

Mula sa discussion group ng Contre-Conference: I recently saw a German program on television (Deutch Welle, I think, running an art/culture program called “Arts 21″) about an on-going light art exhibition in Germany. The television program talked a bit about the history of light art and showed some of Lazlo Moholynagy’s work saying that the early works were “just a side effect.” I thought that this was a rather slanderous statement. However, it struck me that it was quite common for some present new media artists, theorists and institutions to say that the early practitioners in the fields of light, kinetic, analog/digital computer art, were not really involved in “meaning” and were more involved with “structure”; or that the early practitioners were not really involved in “software art” but were more involved in “visual effects.” Generally, the message was that the “new” is better than the “old.” This is the catastrophie of the “new.”

Ang larawan ng korakora sa itaas ay mula sa reproduksyon sa “foto-sanaysay” ng “Ang Timawa sa Kasaysayang Pilipino” ni Nancy Kimuell-Gabriel ng Departamento ng Kasaysayan, DAPP, UP Diliman (bakas 1999 sa “Bagong Kasaysayan, Mga Pag-aaral sa Kasaysayang Pilipino, Lathalain blg. 3) Samantala, ang pagbanggit ni Wang Ta-Yuan ay mula sa “Boat-building and Seamanship in Classic Philippine Society” ni William Henry Scott sa aklat na pinamagatang “Cracks in the Parchment Curtain and other essays in Philippine history” (limbag 1982). Ang larawan ng pintados sa pinaka-itaas ng webpage na ito ay mula sa isang reproduksyon sa “Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society” ni William Henry Scott (limbag 1994).

About the Korakora Blog banner image

The leftmost image is detail from the 19th-century portrait painting (oil on canvas) of Domingo Jimenez attributed to the artist Justiniano Asuncion. This image is taken from the book “Tanaw: Perspectives on the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Painting Collection.”

The center image is from “Una Mestiza Mercader de Manila”, ca. 1830, watercolor on rice paper by Damian Domingo, the Filipino artist who popularized watercolor albums “Tipos del Pais.” From the Eleuterio M. Pascual collection, this image is taken from the book “Art Philippines.”

The rightmost image is an illustration from the Boxer Codex depicting wealthy Filipinos during the 16th-century. This image is taken from the book “Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society” by William Henry Scott, reproduced from a color slide provided by the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana in the U.S.A.

The thumbnail image on this page is detail from a painting by Esteban Villanueva, the Basi (wine) Revolt of the Ilukanos against the Spanish monopoly in 1807.