Accustomed Othering in Colonial

Writing A Review of “Customs of the

Tagalogs” (two relations) by Juan de
Plasencia From The Philippine Islands
1493-1898
Full text accessible via: gutenberg.org
by Sherwin Altarez Mapanoo

September 2015--There are at least three major discursive issues that can be
extracted from the document, Customs of the Tagalogs written by Juan de
Plasencia in 1589, if we are to put socio-political context into the text – first,
the issue of authorship; second, the discourse of power in colonial writing;
and third, the logic of binarism or the Occident-Other dichotomy. These are
interrelated threads that probably constitute major segments of colonial
historical writing in the Philippines.

The authorial voice or authorship plays a pivotal role in putting meaning(s)

to this colonial text. The author, Juan de Plasencia was, in the first place, not
a native Tagalog but a Franciscan missionary who first arrived in the
Philippines in 1577. He was tasked by the King of Spain to document the
customs and traditions of the colonized (“natives”) based on, arguably, his
own observations and judgments. Notably, de Plasencia wrote the Doctrina
Cristiana, an early book on catechism and is believed to be the first book
ever printed in the Philippines. Such initiatives were an accustomed practice
of the colonizer during the Age of Discovery to enhance their superiority
over the colonized and validity of their so-called duties and legacies to the
World. It is a common fact that during this era, the Spanish colonizers,
spearheaded by missionaries, drew a wide variety of texts ranging from
travel narratives and accounts of the colony to even sermons.

In this particular text, de Plasencia tried to avoid discussing the “conflicting

reports of the Indians” through an “informed observation” to obtain the
“simple truth.” This “truth,” however, is debatable, and the manner of how
he actually arrived to his reports is even more problematic. The text
foregrounds two important figures: the observer (de Plasencia) himself, with
his own background, subjectivites and biases; and the observer’s subject
(Tagalogs), seen as the “Other,” a metonymic amalgam of communal
characteristics, local customs and traditions, etc. In colonial situations, the
relationship of these figures – the colonizer and the colonized – flows in
both but unequal directions; the former being the dominant, while the latter
is the inferior one, or as Edward Said put it, “a relationship of power, of
domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony… a sign of
European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a veridic discourse about
the Orient” (72). Seen from the center looking toward the culturally and
politically inferior periphery, the colonizers find identity in its compelling
position as the sophisticated dominating “self” versus the inferior dominated
“Other.” The use of politically incorrect terms such as “Indians,” “tribal”
and “natives,” and adjectives such as “amusing,” “foolish” and “absurd” in
the text is just a manifestation of the conflicting Occident-Other paradigm.

Clearly serving immediate colonial interests, many portions of the narrative

are problematic insofar as they posit the Tagalogs in such a way as to
enhance the validity of the colonizer’s allegiances. Skewed preconception
and descriptive biases thrive throughout the entire document. In de
Placensia’s account on land ownership, for example, he said that “the lands
were divided among the barangay and…no one belonging to another
barangay would cultivate them unless after the purchase or inheritance.”
However, “since the advent of the Spaniards, it is not so divided.” Such
statement implies that the intervention of the colonizer has put order into the
divisiveness. He also made a conclusion that Catholicism was able to expel
primitive and evil belief systems of the Tagalogs regarding gods, burials and
superstitions, saying that “all the Tagalogs not a trace of this is left; and that
those who are now marrying do not even know what it is, thanks to the
preaching of the holy gospel, which has banished it.” This claim undermines
that the Tagalog population did not fully embrace Catholicism but
appropriated it according to their indigenous religious practices. Generalized
and essentialist claims were also made by de Placencia in his discussion of
the local customs in “Laguna and tingues, and among the entire Tagalo
race.” What constituted the Tagalo race in the first place? How did he come
up with such a category? The people of Laguna were just a small member of
the Tagalogs and referring them as the mirror of the entire Tagalo race is
erroneous.
Tagalog royal couple from the Boxer Codex (c. 1595)

A large fraction of his accounts were also based on false comparisons, and
not coupled with accurate information. He repetitively compared local
traditions with Western paradigm/parameters. The Tagalog idol, lic-ha, for
example, was matched up with Romans’ statue of deity of a dead man who
was brave in war and endowed with special faculties. These two objects are
evidently different in nature and don’t fall under the same category. Datos
were also described as the equivalent of the European “nobles,” hence
undermining the indigenous political systems. Worse, the ritualistic and
superstitious beliefs of the Tagalogs were mocked by de Placencia, by
coming up with various categories of devil-ish beliefs. The mangagauay and
mangagayoma, for instance, were both regarded as “witches” who
performed deceitful healing procedures, a judgment made by an outsider
who knew nothing about the complexity of indigenous psyche. What he
failed to realize is that in traditional cultures, these so-called “evil” practices
were an integral part of Filipino folk beliefs; and the early Tagalogs, in
reality, never considered them as acts of the devil. Needless to say, the
application of Western parameters to local traditions has often proven
fractious especially in classifying and describing local and colonial
situations.

Given the plethora of biases and to a great extent, inaccurate judgments and
pretensions of the author, the text was clearly not written for local
consumption, but for Western readers. Customs of the Tagalogs, just like
any other colonial texts written during the Spanish colonial period, was
intentionally made to provide an exoticize description of the Tagalog
natives, clearly fed by politics and propaganda and operated with the
Western-outsider's gaze, that would be appealing to them.