Covar, Prospero. 1998. Larangan

Covar, Prospero. 1998. Larangan: Seminal Essays on Philippine Culture, Manila: Sampaguita Press. Pilipinolohiya (Chapter 4) is the systematic study of the Filipino psyche, and of Philippine culture and society. The Filipino, Covar writes, is like a banga (vessel), and s/he has: labas (exteriority), loob (interiority), and lalim (depth). Using structural functionalism and concepts from indigenous …

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Annotation: Holt, Elizabeth Mary. 2002. Colonizing Filipinas

Holt, Elizabeth Mary. 2002. Colonizing Filipinas: Nineteenth Century Representations in Western Historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press. Borrowing Foucault's problematization of the past as a “succession of buried presents” (153), Holt looks at the first twelve years of American rule in the Philippines. Early historians, she writes, were caught up in patriarchically structured discourses, …

Annotation: de Jesus, Melinda (ed). 2005. Pinay Power

de Jesus, Melinda (ed). 2005. Pinay Power: Theorizing the Filipina/American Experience. New York: Routledge. In this collection of essays by Filipino American peminists, Peminism “signifies the assertion of a specifically Filipina American subjectivity, one that radically repudiates white feminist hegemony as it incorporates the Filipino American oppositional politics” (de Jesus, 5). Peminist theorizing requires the …

Annotation: Tolentino, Roland. 1996. Bodies, Letters, Catalogs

Tolentino, Roland. 1996. Bodies, Letters, Catalogs: Filipinas in Transnational Space. Social Text, 48 (Autumn): 49-76. Tolentino looks at the mail-order bride phenomenon within what he calls the “geopolitics of place and location.” While the author does not substantiate his arguments with ethnographic data, as, according to him, women do not easily reveal their past, he …

Annotation: Cheng, Sealing. 2010. On the Move for Love

Cheng, Sealing. 2010. On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cheng presents the global context that has brought about the gendered “ethnoscape” (Appadurai) in Dongducheon, situating the presence of foreign migrant entertainers as emerging from the political and military relations of the Korean …

Annotation: Lansing, Stephen. 1990. The Decolonization of Ethnographic Film

Lansing, Stephen. 1990. The Decolonization of Ethnographic Film. Visual Anthropology Review 6:13-15, 81. As the author writes, anthropology’s positivist approach, and the idea that anthropology is almost a branch of natural history is “probably gone for good,” and has become “replaced with a more equivocal picture of a scholar who becomes engaged with the people …

Annotation: Edwards, Elizabeth E. 2006. Photographs and the Sound of History

Edwards, Elizabeth E. 2006. Photographs and the Sound of History. Visual Anthropology 21: 27-46. The article supports a growing focus on sensuous, evocative and experiential anthropology. As framework, the authors uses the Gell’s action-centered approach, Stoller’s notions of sensuous scholarship, and finally, Langford’s suggestion to look into the orality of the photographs. Central to the …

Annotation: Brijnath, Bianca. 2009. Familial Bonds and Boarding Passes

Brijnath, Bianca. 2009. Familial Bonds and Boarding Passes: Understanding Caregiving in a Transnational Context. Identities, 16(1):83-101. The author writes that there are multiple narratives embedded in the lives that are lived transnationally, and she asks: “whose story do we focus on?.” She admits that she opted to omit certain poignant stories from this article, as …

Annotation: Torresan, Angela. 2011. Roundtrip: Filming a Return Home

Torresan, Angela. 2011. Roundtrip: Filming a Return Home. Visual Anthropology Review, 27(2): 119-130. Torresan follows MacDougall's (1992) view that images produce a different kind of knowledge, and that film allows one to “learn something experientially”. In addition, Torresan argues that film “works theoretically”, and that it is a “suggestive project that connotes, rather than denotes, …

Annotation: Buckley, William. 2005. Objects of Love and Decay

Buckley, William. 2005. Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial Archive. Cultural Anthropology, 20(2):249-270. The photographs being discussed in the article are the 2,600 images from the National Archives of the Gambia in West Africa usually described according to “narratives of decay” (251). This decay, as Buckley writes, is central to the …