Organizer and Chair: Vina A. Lanzona, Univ. of Hawaii
Discussant: Michael M. Cullinane, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Since the 1960’s, there has been much interest and activity in oral history and Southeast Asian studies. As a method, oral history gives us access to the experiences of illiterate people or social groups who are either absent from written records or whose presence is diminished or distorted by them. By recording the intimate details of people’s daily lives that are usually missing from grand historical narratives, especially those of women and other marginalized groups, oral testimony also casts new light on unexplored areas of the historical past. The significance of oral history is especially great in Southeast Asia, where “orality” and the “oral tradition” often take precedence over the written form. But oral history presents unique challenges to both interviewers and interviewees. How do issues of cultural identity and difference shape the relationship between interviewer and subject? Does cultural likeness and familiarity or personal and intellectual distance produce more genuine and honest recollections? How should the researcher balance the personal intimacy and confidence needed to create a dialogue with his/her subjects, with the preservation of intellectual objectivity, rigor and integrity? What is the purpose and function of oral history? What role does memory (or its failure) play in reconstructing the past? And how does one reconcile oral testimonies with written accounts? Through the exploration of such issues, this panel seeks to open up new and interdisciplinary perspectives on the practice and theory of oral history in Southeast Asia, and especially in Philippine Studies where its practice remains relatively unreflective and under theorized.
During the 1990’s, I embarked on an oral history project to find the Huk Amazons, female guerrillas who were actively involved in the so-called Huk rebellion, a peasant-based struggle in the Central Luzon region of the Philippines that began during the Japanese occupation and continued into the postwar years. Although these Huk women gained prominence in newspapers and magazines after World War II, they remained largely unnamed, faceless and unrecognized in historical accounts of the Huk rebellion. Determined to demonstrate the central role that women played in the Huk movement, my work (and my book) has tried to tell the stories of these women drawing on their own memories and words, but capturing the voices of Huk women, who have been marginalized in historical accounts and in popular memory, presented challenges as well as opportunities. In this paper, I explore what Sherna Gluck calls the “feminist encounter” between myself and these women, revealing the difficulties, both practical and methodological, that I confronted in encouraging Huk women to open up about their past, and the way my exchanges with them changed my own understanding about the Huk rebellion, Philippine history, and my identity as a Filipina and historian.
Since 1993, I have studying the Spanish community in the Philippines throughout the 20th Century, with the larger aim of learning how the de-Hispanization of the Philippines occurred during this period, viewing, at least hypothetically, the decade of 1935-1945 as the turning-point in this process. After the 1936 proclamation of the Commonwealth, which put the Philippines on ten-year timetable for full independent, the Spanish community underwent difficulties, in from new laws that created difficulties for foreigners. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 complicated the community’s position enormously. Division between Republicans and Francista rebels, radicalization, and strong pressure for economic support of Civil War partisans brought the community to the brink of exhaustion. Moreover, their image in the Philippines also changed. Tainted as pro-Falangistas, later as pro-Axis, and finally as pro-Japanese, Spaniards living in Manila struggled to survive while those in the Philippine countryside suffered the consequences of this negative image during the Japanese occupation. Over time, the surviving community’s responses have ranged from a begrudging acceptance of Filipinization to concealing the facts and, above all, avoiding discussion of this painful process of post-colonial decolonization. In tracing this tangled past, oral interviews with surviving members of the Spanish colony oral history interviews remain an invaluable guide.
Since the publication of Jan Vansina’s path-breaking book on Oral Tradition, much has been written on the methodology and historiography of oral history--creating an evidentiary canon but missing, or even obscuring, a critical element in these interactions. Taking a leaf from the short story “Guayaquil" by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, I will argue that academic writing seems to understate the power of these interviews not just to inform, but to transform scholarly research--an infrequent yet significant feature of the oral history interviews with several hundred Filipino interlocutors that I have conducted over the past 35 years. This experience of sitting for hours or days before a Filipino narrator, nodding and speaking only occasionally, lifts me from a state of near ignorance and often provides a new perspective, a fund of empathy, critical information, or, on occasion, a wrenching, transformative insight, shattering one approach and inspiring another. Though I might decorate these original insights with months of research to test, confirm, and elaborate, this interview often remains the Archimedean point for the book or article that follows. Just as cultures can shape the scholars who study them, so my approach to oral history has been informed by the ways that these Filipino narrators, whether senators or stevedores, seem to treat oral communications. Sources have refused interviews, evaded questions, forgotten details, and turned off the recorder, but they almost never, with the exception of military officers training US pyswar doctrines, knowingly misrepresented the facts. Sources generally seem sensitive to the integrity of the oral record, taking care to distinguish between first- or second-hand information and admitting to possible bias that might color their narration. Searching for sources of this particular orality, Filipino cultures with their rich traditions of myth, epic, and ballad seem to foster raconteurs who are gifted in recall and revel in the performative moment. These interactions, still woefully under theorized, have shaped my approach to oral history, influencing my perception of both its methodology and historiography and creating a felt need for reflection.
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