DEFINING THE FILIPINO THROUGH ARTS: FROM SPECIALISTIC

INNOCENCE TO PARTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

The world is like a home of different culture, making it the most crucial part of a human.
It has the one and only magic that binds a particular society to be connected to everyone.
Unfortunately, as we go through this modern time, I am slowly believing that we are the ones
who are making the “damaged culture”.

We, Filipinos, are very proud of our diverse culture since the indigenous times or who
knows. But we also tend to divert our attention if anything new interests us- and that’s the
biggest problem of Filipinos today. We embrace tighter for example the western culture; we
compare a lot and forget that we have our own in the very first place. We’re also slowly losing
our sense of shared identity, leading to lessen the nationalism inside of us. Our education
system is highly westernized, causing more Filipinos to leave behind the culture where they
bloom. Maybe it’s from our experience when we are colonized? It conditioned us to seek for
better not knowing we are leaving something behind? One example also is the Dona Victorina
Syndrome, many Filipinos are like that, once we go higher than everyone else, we are forgetting
where we started. We are being ashamed of our own culture, like having names that seems old
when pronounced and not pleasing from a foreigner’s ears. Manilenos also considered
‘probinsyanos’ as inferior to them, when in fact, we are living on leveling our status based on
how civilized our place was. We carelessly abandoned the rich of indigenous culture, we are
alien of our own nation’s culture yet we are shamelessly voicing out that we have a nourished
culture? But despite all of this, something is truly ours eternally- the capacity to laugh and go
life under struggles and that’s how the world know a ‘Filipino’.

Knowing this is like knowing the deeper reflection of arts. It is like a chaotic interaction
of different beliefs, values and cultures. In everything we do, there is art just like how culture
mirrored every one’s character. In art, there are also literary works and such that making whole
a nation’s culture. It can provide an image of social relations and cultural values. There is the
consciousness and manifestation in everybody else. Being careful to a lot of people is one’s
Filipino culture and it is a trademark of maturity. Just like in art, it is a hallmark of social
integration. There is no definite definition to explain how art is seen through culture, but don’t
we realize, culture itself is one of the biggest forms of Arts. It is amazing despite of flaws, there
are hundred ways to see it as a beautiful masterpiece, no matter how damaged our culture is.