Publications

This chapter presents the genealogy of protest performances on the Philippine stage and proposes the revolutionary rhetoric of creating an assembly is transformed into an active protestation in the process. This genealogy has created a radical figure of solidarity between the performers and the audience members by renewing a sense of community through dissent against forces of oppression. This community is forged inside the auditorium with artists commonly hoping for it to be extended outside the theatre. In the formation of a community, the stage has invited the audience into transcendence in the rehearsal of social responsibility through the presentation of the everyday social life of the Filipino people, particularly those involving abuse, repression, and oppression. In the end, the stage signals recognition of what Judith Butler calls the precarity of each other and recognition of the other as other and not as an object of one’s enjoyment, work, and possession.

"Education for a Globalizing Asia: Challenges and Opportunities is a collection of papers and commentaries on the varying effects of globalization on education systems in Asia. It focuses on institutional, curricular and procedural changes that these education systems underwent to promote global competitiveness. Western models of education reform, observes the book, provide impetus for these changes, modification that revolve around strategies meant to enhance instruction, research and education governance. While gains from these changes are apparent, this collection also highlights difficulties that Asian educational institutions continue to confront as they seek better policies and processes and vie for higher rankings. The strong and almost exclusive emphasis on North American and Western European rubics of excellence, the lack of inclusivity, and the growing corporatization of schools are some of the most notable unintended consequences of internalization that merit further study. Warranting attention as well is the absence of alternative paradigms that acknowledge cultural, economic and political diversity, and plurarity of perspectives on internalization. It is hoped that a more nuanced understanding of Asian experiences reform can be obtained through this book." (From the Ateneo de Manila University Press website)

Gathering several of National Artist Federico Aguilar Alcuaz’s works from the late 1950s to the 1980s, the exhibition reveals a glimpse to the general contours and the evolution of the artist’s style, as he explored different subject matter and media both here and abroad. Specifically looking into his artistic practice presses the questions as to what it means to be a global artist, and how it intersects with his grammar of modernism. The essay attempts to respond to these questions through its effort to reap out themes that surface from the artist’s works in the exhibition.

This article argues that the interfraternity wars or “rumbles” that occur at the University of the Philippines Diliman must be understood as dynamic violent interactions between male-exclusive organizations equipped with the capability for group cohesion and defiance and is oriented to hegemonic masculinity. Analysis of 264 incidents reported from 1990 to 2013, indicates a shift in the pattern of rumbles: while there is an overall decrease of incidents, rumbles have concentrated in fewer fraternities over the years. The study further analyzes the narratives of 15 fraternity men (14 alumni and one student) about their own experiences of rumbles in the past, the emotions and sensations involved in being “at war” with rival fraternities, and their own criticisms about the culture of violence among fraternities. The study demonstrates how fraternities are at risk for hypermasculine behavioral paths that regard rumbles as a means to assert dominance over other fraternities and circumvent routes to hegemonic masculinity. The study also links micro-level factors of situational interactions and organizational features to larger cultural scripts regarding masculinity and future national leadership. Finally, the study provides insights in preventing fraternity-related violence in the campus and points to the challenges of gender socialization of UP students in relation to imaginaries of national service and future national leadership.

Ang librong ito ay koleksiyon ng limampu’t dalawang sanaysay na sinulat sa buong taon ng 2010 na lumabas sa kolum kong Konteksto sa alternatibong publikasyong Pinoy Weekly. Mainam na balik-balikan ang mga artikulong ito para malaman ang konteksto ng maraming problemang kinakaharap ng bayan, at kung ano ang papel ng pagpapalit ng administrasyong Arroyo at Aquino sa pagresolba sa mga ito.

Cultural performance first appeared in the language of the academic community when Milton Singer published his book When Great Tradition Modernizes (1972), in which he proposed cultural performance as a unit of observation in an anthropological inquiry. Since then, cultural performance has become a useful tool to provide a frame for the understanding of the self, society and culture. This essay reflects on the concept of cultural performance in a preliminary attempt to historicize and to contextualize it using Philippine culture as a starting point. The first part is a descriptive illustration on how the term evolved from being a social scientif ic concept to an important subject in the humanities, particularly in the fields of theatre and performance studies. Included in this section is a proposal based on reflections by anthropologists, folklorists and performance scholars for a model illustrating some identifiable markers that signify an activity as a cultural performance. The second part is a paradigmatic schematization of the specifics of how cultural performance may be understood in the context of the Philippines. Using the phenomena of panata, pagtitipon and pagdiriwang, this paper argues that Philippine cultural performances are artistic communications in small groups performed publicly as a community gathering, even if the intentions of many performers are personal. The preliminary arguments found in this essay are based mostly on sporadic field notes in various locales in the archipelago.

The essay is a general overview of the Philippine Performance Archive on Cultural Performances. The first part is an introduction and a presentation of the archival project with emphasis on the concept of cultural performance, concretized within performance studies paradigm using Philippine society and culture as context. The second part is a discussion of how data in the archive were documented and collected using focused ethnography as primary methodology. The method is argued to be the distinguishing mark of the project from other digital archives. Also, this section provides a detailed exposition about the significance of understanding local performance vocabularies and how these terms are translated into the archive through semantic framing. In the end, it is asserted that the Philippine Performance Archive on Cultural Performances functions not only as a repository of resource materials on the study of Philippine cultural performances but also as a performative cultural memory and a pedagogical tool.

A fast, facile, nonhazardous, environment-friendly, and high yield process was developed for the plasma treatment of graphite particles and the production of plasma-functionalized multilayered graphene (pf-MLG). Graphite particles (<20 μm) were functionalized using a subatmospheric 13.56 MHz radio frequency-excited oxygen plasma followed by liquid-phase exfoliation to produce pf-MLG with a high aspect ratio (>2585) with <20 graphene layers. The exfoliated graphene also exhibited high dispersibility in water after plasma functionalization without the use of surfactants. The pf-MLG nanoflakes were incorporated into a cement mixture with 0.1 and 0.5 wt% pf-MLG loading. A 56% increase in compressive strength of cement mortars was achieved for the 0.5 wt% pf-MLG after 28 days curing. This is attributed to the strong interfacial interaction between graphene and the cement matrix and the promotion of hydration. The highly scalable process of pf-MLG-reinforced cement will make a positive impact on the environment, especially in the construction industry.

The Philippines is an archipelagic nation of more than 7,000 islands with marine resources under intense pressure from market-driven extraction, numerous maritime interests to protect, and pressing issues including pollution, overfishing and degradation of resources, ineffective regulation of coastal and marine resources, population growth, urbanization and poverty. Over 60 percent of the Philippines’ more than 100 million population live in coastal areas. From the perspective of demography alone, the significance of the fisheries sector for the Philippine population is considerable. Yet, ethnographic work written by Filipinos on coastal fishing communities in the Philippines is surprisingly sparse. In terms of published books and academic journals, there are more non-Filipino authors than local ones. Given the Philippines’ archipelagic character and reliance on aquatic resources, an important question looms: Why hasn’t the surrounding sea played a larger role in the rise of Philippine anthropology?

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In this article, I examine the shifting political ecologies of governance of Laguna Lake, Philippines, in the context of historical and contemporary populist political rhetoric. Rodrigo Duterte, who was elected president in 2016 through a platform of change, brought national attention again to the lake by promising to give it back to the people marginalized by decades-long elite capture. This populist rhetoric is the latest in attempts to manage an urban resource frontier with conflicting demands and uses. By narrating a history of governance of Laguna Lake, I trace parallels between current and past strategies of addressing resource conflicts: from Ferdinand Marcos’s authoritarian rule in the 1970s and 1980s and the pluralist modes that followed to Duterte’s law-and-order vision of development. By comparing the populist narratives of Marcos and Duterte, I demonstrate that populist rhetoric in authoritarian forms entails the contradictory processes of politicization of the problem and depoliticization of solutions. Authoritarian populist narratives transform the framing of environmental problems through antagonistic politics even as solutions are constrained within existing depoliticized technologies of government that limit the spaces of contestations. Key Words: authoritarian, Duterte, Laguna Lake, Marcos, populism.

Links to 33 publications between 2011 to 2019 are listed.

Mobilizing the concepts of aenigma and nostalgia, the analyses of Gelvezon-Téqui’s printmaking practice and retrospective exhibition in 2020, respectively, enabled the openness to the potentials of obscurity in relaying contesting and complicating discourses on how phenomena in sociality, particularly patronage and resistance, are dominantly understood.