Publications

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.

Southeast Asian governments have maintained “energy self‐reliance” and “energy security” as essential rationales of their macroeconomic policy. Since the availability of energy remains necessary for unabated domestic growth and development, the pursuit for “alternative” sources of energy and the resolve to build sustainable energy systems are constant priorities. Informed by the literature on policy discourse, this article draws attention to the analytical use and significance of policy discourse as a means to examine sustainable energy policies in Southeast Asia, which dominantly adopted an economic lens for “energy supply security.” Policy documents were examined to show the congruence and variation of policy discourses that prompted the governments of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore to institutionalize sustainable energy development from 2000 to 2016—a critical period for the institutionalization of sustainable energy in the region, when domestic renewable energy sectors and systems were simultaneously being established by these governments.

Research has shown that heritage is a contested concept which not only creates unnecessary binaries but also perpetuates essentialized First World imagery of Asian countries. To assist in its reframing, this paper proposes critical ethnography. It is argued that through it, a more nuanced and community-based understanding of cultural heritage can be developed, thus allowing the articulation of modalities of cultural heritage and the formation of alternative imaginaries. To develop this point, the essay problematizes the heritage concept, examines how governing policies and tourism frameworks define cultural heritage vis-àvis its use in the tourism industry, and discusses the theoretical sources and intellectual legacy of critical ethnography. Cases from Batanes and Marinduque provinces, the Philippines, are reviewed to serve as background. With critical ethnography as a strategic method, the essay suggests that the semiotics of heritage tourism can be broadened and possibilities for social change in Asian tourism and hospitality established.

Urban metabolism refers to the socioecological exchange processes and transformations in cities. Different fields deploy the concept in various ways, rooted in nineteenth‐century work in biology and Marxist theory. Using urban metabolism as a metaphor, a research paradigm, or a methodological tool, studies have ranged from industrial ecological accounting of material energy flows in cities to a focus on the historical production of socionatures in urban political ecology. The multiple meanings and broad scope of metabolism have initiated debates on the usefulness of the concept but have also created spaces for interdisciplinary dialogues that integrate methods and approaches in understanding urban environmental change.

The article argues that understanding hegemonic masculinity can be amplified by looking into the situational contexts of men’s interactions in fraternity initiations based on the analysis of narratives of 15 fraternity men. Fraternity members from a Philippine university reached for hegemonic masculinity through the masculine exemplar of toughness to demonstrate preparedness for academic success, dominance in campus positions, and future national leadership. Through violentization (Athens, 2015), their initiations simulate the power clash between harsh patriarchs and supportive brothers that place young men’s bodies as objects and subjects of testing and indoctrination. Individual and collective efforts to critique and eschew the hypermasculinity of initiation violence achieved limited success although the pursuit of alternative socialization rituals remains a challenge.