Publications

For this paper, the researcher attempts to describe the clause structure of Tagalog using Cognitive Grammar. Abiding by the said framework, sentences are regarded as grammatical constructions that represent different event schemas, which are then categorised into situations in: (1) the material world, or how the structured world exists, changes, or undergoes processes; and (2) the psychological world, or the internal world of human sensation, emotion, perception and thought. Analysing the semantic grammar of Tagalog, that is, looking at linguistic utterances as motivated by the meaning that the speaker wants to express, this study aims to provide new insights with regards to the characteristics of the components of grammar as a reflection of cognition.

Principal components regression (PCR) is used in resolving the multicollinearity problem but specification bias occurs due to the selection only of the important principal components to be included resulting in the deterioration of predictive ability of the model. We propose the PCR in a nonparametric framework to address the multicollinearity problem while minimizing the specification bias that affects predictive ability of the model. The simulation study illustrated that nonparametric PCR addresses the multicollinearity problem while retaining higher predictive ability relative to parametric principal components regression model.

A fossil femur excavated by Euge`ne Dubois between 1891–1900 in the Lower/Middle Pleistocene bonebed of the Trinil site (Java, Indonesia) was recognised by us as that of a Hylobatidae. The specimen, Trinil 5703 of the Dubois Collection (Leiden, The Netherlands), has the same distinctive form of fossilization that is seen in many of the bonebed fossils from Trinil in the collection. Anatomical comparison of Trinil 5703 to a sample of carnivore and primate femora, supported by morphometric analyses, lead to the attribution of the fossil to gibbon. Trinil 5703 therefore provides the oldest insular record of this clade, one of the oldest known Hylobatidae fossils from Southeast Asia. Because living Hylobatidae only inhabit evergreen rain forests, the paleoenvironment within the river drainage in the greater Trinil area evidently included forests of this kind during the Lower/Middle Pleistocene as revealed here.

Although exercise motivation is a well-established research area in exercise and sport psychology in the West, relatively little work on this topic is available in the Philippines. This study explored motives for exercise among Filipinos using an open-ended methodology. Five hundred ninety-two Filipinos aged 15 to 69 were asked to free-list possible motives for exercise participation. Two thousand ninety-five responses (about four per participant) were coded by two independent judges via direct content analysis and using themes derived from the Exercise Motivation Inventory subscales (EMI-2; Markland & Ingledew, 1997). The most frequently identified motives for exercise were highly extrinsic – Filipinos exercise for weight management, positive health, and strength and endurance. Challenge, social recognition, and competition were the least frequently cited motives. Results also surfaced participation motives outside those in the EMI-2, such as exercising to satisfy a requirement, to improve posture, and due to directed social influence from peers and family.

Naglalaman ng anim na isinaling dula ang aklat na naitanghal na noon sa Dulaang UP, Metropolitan, Vinzon’s Hall sa UP at sa Unibersidad ng Santo Tomas. Nailathala na rin ang mga ito tulad ng “Nora” sa salin ng “A Doll’s House ni Henrik Ibsen sa Malay, ang Dyornal sa De La Salle University, sa 18 Plays Translated in Filipino ang “Kalahating Oras sa Isa Kumbento” (Half An Hour In A Convent), “Tatlong Ulupong” (Three Rats) , at “Katanungan” (Question Mark) ni Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero. Matatagpuan rin sa publikasyon ng Diwa ang ilang sipi mula sa mga dulang “Pagkahaba-haba Man ng Prusisyon” (Much Ado About Nothing) ni William Shakespeare, “Anim na Tauhang Naghahanap ng Mangangatha” (Six Characters in Search of an Author) ni Luigi Pirandello at “Nora” ni Hendrik Ibsen. Sinikap ng tagasalin na higit na kontemporaneo ang lengguwahe sa ginawang rebisyon sa mga dula. Nilangkapan rin ng mga tanong bilang Gabay sa Pag-aaral at Talambuhay ng Awtor ang bawat dula upang lubos na makatulong sa mga mambabasa/mag-aaral at/o magtatanghal ng mga dula.

This paper examines the complexities of producing fish for the city and substituting wild with farmed fish. Using the urban metabolism framework and commodity biographies approach, it takes the case of peri-urban aquaculture in Laguna Lake, Philippines and focuses on the metabolic transformations of bighead carp, an introduced lake fish primarily consumed in nearby Metro Manila. Increased lake production of cheap fish like bighead carp did not immediately result in greater urban consumption, which remained limited owing to consumer unfamiliarity and the material characteristics of the fish tied to its production in the lake. By following the fish, the paper tells the story of how bighead carp has been and is being made amenable for urban consumption in Metro Manila’s wet markets, kitchens and fish processing sites. It discusses the material practices associated with the transformation of fish in their displacement through the metaphors of distancing, entanglement, frictions and flows. It argues that particular relations between fish and the aquatic environment materially produce fish that is in turn metabolized in the city through everyday practices that reconstitute fish commodities. These practices show that despite the production of more cheap fish, the substitution of capture fisheries by aquaculture is a messy process that reflects metabolic contradictions that fish materially embody and that have material effects on fish production and consumption.

This essay proposes cosmopolitan entanglement as a conceptual framework for the understanding of the Philippine pista (fiesta). The pista is a cosmopolitan phenomenon because communities engage in a disposition of cultural openness with the strange and the stranger. It is a performance of entanglement because it is a complex cultural phenomenon projected to be solemn yet secular, a festivity that neither the State nor the Church is in an ultimate position of authority, a parade of divinity, and a procession of spectacle. In arguing for cosmopolitan entanglement in the pista, the essay explores the 2007 Agawan festivity in Sariaya, Quezon, some 120 km south of Manila, as a case study. The first part is a conceptualization of cosmopolitanism as related to the pista using the Catholic dogma as lens. The analysis of Catholic dogma is necessary because in the Philippines the pista has its origin in Catholicism, its celebrations often coinciding with the feast day of a community’s patron saint. The second part examines the pista as a performance of entanglement. The final section describes the Sariaya pista via the Agawan festival as a case of cosmopolitan entanglement. The pista in Sariaya is an exemplar of cosmopolitan entanglement because community members perform cultural openness, which is also a mixing and matching of different performance activities, a strategy of combining the secular and the sacred, and a welcoming gesture to both the familiar and the stranger.

Set in Makati, the central business district of the National Capital Region, Welcometo IntelStar is a monodrama satirizing the call center industry in the Philippines.The performance is an exemplar in positioning a diasporic consequence ofglobalization vis-à-vis nationalism because it calls on a national sentiment to theextent that the play illustrates resistance to globalization’s economic and neoliberalattachments, often perceived as the destructive force of cultural diversity anduniqueness. In relation, the performance used a recurring trope in Philippineculture, which is called in the essay as the Americanization issue: the conception ofthe Filipino/a as a master mimic of other cultures, particularly the American one.Overall, Welcome to IntelStar falls short in its criticism of globalization becauseit isolated the phenomenon within the politics of the market. But nevertheless,the play allows the Filipino body, through its protagonist Chelsea, to be “visible.”With her “expertise” at imitation, Chelsea’s visibility destabilizes the global order.Chelsea’s mimicry is not simply about wanting to be like those who are imitated,but a strategy to assert a sense of self. This imitative performance implies selfconsciousnessand intimacy to the one being imitated. In this way, mimicry as selfactualizationis a creative strategy and has the potential to overthrow hierarchies ofglobalization in neo-colonial and neo-imperial orders.

Disaster risk reduction (DRR), and indeed development at large, has traditionally been reluctant to acknowledge and accept the issue of gendered and sexual diversity in its mainstream policy design and practice. Recent forays into mainstreaming gender and sexual minorities into DRR have, however, highlighted the crucial role that these minorities play in bigger development aspirations of participation and empowerment. This debate article explores the notion of ‘queering development’ in DRR, and by drawing upon a recent DRR project in a rural area of the Philippines that is at high risk of natural hazards, we suggest a new framework for conceptualizing and ‘doing’ DRR.

This article critiques the komedya vis-à-vis its institutionalization as national theatre form and proposes a cosmopolitan alternative in the critique. It argues that the imposition of a nationalist perspective in the reading the form falls into the trap of territoriality and “othering” because of its Roman Catholic and Tagalog-centric orientations. The cosmopolitan critique is necessary because it embodies a middle-path alternative to the essentializing and territorializing character of popular nationalism and the anarchy of pluralism. The discussion of cosmopolitanism comes from the irony that komedya could have offered a cosmopolitan possibility when Filipino artists began its indigenization. The efficacy of this possibility was overpowered by methodological nationalism based on the hegemony of the center (The Greater Manila Area) and its central religion – Catholicism. Thus, the komedya was contextualized as a Catholic theatre form and strengthened a particular hostility against non-Catholics, especially the Muslims.

Commodification of kidneys has become a new locus for co-optation of the human body, bioethics, and legal standards on organ donation and transplantation in the biocapitalist era. Neoliberal policies operate through a new constitutionalism, which opens the healthcare system of developing countries like the Philippines to transplant tourism’s promises of huge economic gains. This article explores how the human rights of most male providers from poor communities who sell their kidneys are seriously compromised by the inconsistent and inadequate rules governing organ donation, transplantation and bioethics. I have employed textual analysis of the existing Philippine laws on organ donation and transplantation; biographical narrations of kidney sellers from Baseco, Manila; and key-informant interviews with organizations opposing organ commodification in this area to explore how the bodies of the poor are treated as “organ banks for the better off” in an era when biotechnology promises longer lives to those who can pay. As a way forward, I suggest that the actors involved in the organ donation and transplantation process should share the responsibility to address the social injustices associated with it.