[Last February,
Northern Illinois University was host to Dr. Erlinda K. Alburo, director
of the Cebuano Studies Center, University of San Carlos in Cebu City
(Philippines). As Fulbright research fellow, she was there mainly
to go over the materials left by Donn Hart. She writes the following
from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.]
Reading what I
could in special sections of the Founders library until 4:30pm, I
felt like entering a world that my grandmother had told me about and
which I was too small to appreciate. I have taken digital shots of
some pictures documenting that world and I shall share them with friends
back home. My one regret is that I had not enough time to go over
the vertical files and the field notes of Dr. Hart thoroughly, and
my one hope is that I shall be able to finish doing so in some future
time. It was a surprise to be told that I was perhaps the very first
to ask to take a look at those materials.
These notes corroborate
data I have compiled from Spanish-period dictionaries of Visayan,
a remaining resource for studying our past that few scholar-detectives
have used. Indeed, the abundance of terms lost to my generation tells
us of the richness of a culture that relied primarily on the natural
surroundings for the physical and spiritual life of the people. There
are names of boats according to size and function; plants with healing,
decorative, nutritional and ritual uses; nets and traps for various
types of marine species; weapons for household use, hunting and fighting;
and terms in ceramics, weaving, toys, personal grooming, entertainment,
etc.
I found three sorts of materials: articles, typescripts and manuscripts
written by Dr. Hart himself; those of his fellow Philippinists (both
in vertical files); and the field notes of interviews conducted in
Negros Oriental and Samar between 1954 and 1965 that were in four
boxes at the Rare Books/Special Collection section. Even if the vertical
files are only until the 1980s, they reflect the interests of an earlier
period in Philippine scholarship, and are useful to one coming from
a provincial city in the Philippines to whom US journals are seldom
accessible. Of Dr. Hart's several annotated bibliographies that must
have served many scholars, I was fascinated by a guide to Southeast
Asian novels. An accompanying article stressed the significance of
such novels to social scientists like public administrators and political
scientists, in their study of reactions, situations, personalities,
values and behavior. One insight given in the novels with overseas
Americans as characters is on the role of food in culture shock. As
sample, I looked up a novel by the American missionary W. H. Thomas
entitled A Manila Romance: Life in the East Indies (1873) and photocopied
the first few pages.
Another discovery
was the Overland Monthly (San Francisco, 1868-1935), founded by the
short-story writer Bret Harte, which carried articles on the reworking
of saints' narratives by Filipinos (1905), progress on the Visayan
and Manila railroads (1907-1908), and a version of the Juan Pusong
tale (1909). There is also a document by Jose Marco, annotated by
the historiographer Manuel Artigas y Cuerva, who notes that cockfighting
was encouraged by the Spanish administration to attract mountaineers
to come down. Still other articles, although somewhat dated, will
have use in comparative studies, like Sibley's study into why rural
Filipinos are reluctant to give up beliefs in spirits in spite of
Church teachings and of modern education, and Lieban's on sorcery
as indication at the local level of the limitations of the nation-state.
It is the field
notes, however, that teem with details often accompanied by illustrations,
which I'm tempted to compare with those in the longer, phenomenal
work on the Visayas by Francisco Ignacio Alcina. Cited in the notes
is the encounter between the Christianized Visayans and the indigenous
Bukidnon, which Alcina did not mention in Samar or Leyte. Dr. Hart
also comments on his approaching and negotiating with informants and
on his donations of money (to buy coconut wine or tuba) and in kind
(tuba) to facilitate the narrative flow. Life histories (as mediated
by the interpreter) can give information that elude interview schedules
and participant observation, e.g., why women forsook the wearing of
abaca, how the mouth was kept open while teeth were filed, what the
folk did to crows scavenging on their precious carabaos that died
of an epidemic (these were herded together to escape both the guerrilla
fighters and the Americans); how children made a toy car made of buri
leaves, why kids crawled up the beams of the stage while watching
a play, or that the folk of Caticugan entertained at fiesta time only
as they could afford and not resorting to borrowing money or selling
animals (as others are reported to do), etc.
But the world I'm familiar with is well described in the notes: ".
. .one can say that in most barrio houses you will find calendars,
usually donated by Chinese merchants, the mirrors with place for putting
pictures of marriages, birthday dates, etc-usually vacant. Then there
will be frames filled with photos of relatives, members of family,
or friends, just portraits, graduation pictures, funerals-often with
family grouped around the coffin, the latter sometimes showing the
corpse, school class pictures. There are always the wooden chests
which can be locked and I think many of them contain hand-operated
sewing machines. Singer, of course! Quite frequently newspapers, pages
from magazine, both colored and black and white are pasted on the
walls. Always, of course, the family shrine with gaudy pictures of
saints, painted plaster saints, and often old wooden saints in various
stages of deterioration, inherited from the parents of occupants of
houses."
That world, of
course, is now strange to my own children.
