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Heresies
Once more Professor Mina Roces
by P.N.
Abinales
Too
bad the Forum staff failed to send me Professor Mina Roces’ curt
retort (26 September 2002) to my review of her book Kinship Politics
in Post-War Philippines. Had I received it earlier I would have
discarded that largely frivolous essay about smoking and revolution
in favor of a more passionate engagement with what the professor
from University of New South Wales (what is the Philippine equivalent
here? The University of the Visayas perhaps?) wrote. Fortunately,
one of the perks of writing a column is the privilege of being allowed
return to old topics. So I am exercising that perk here.
Let me focus
on the three issues Roces raised: the nationalism of Filipino oligarchs;
the comparison with the United States; and her complaint that her
book stands on its own, without the benefit of insights from historians
Reynaldo Ileto and Resil Mojares.
First, I actually
do not question that elites can be nationalists. But there are,
as the literature on nationalism suggests, also different kinds
of nationalisms. Benedict Anderson alones distinguishes between
popular nationalism and “official nationalism” and his detractors
like Anthony Smith and Partha Chatterjee even go beyond that by
introducing more sub-categories of nationalists. My problem then
is why did Roces ignore these nuances? Is it enough to say that
elite families fought the Japanese and Marcos to label them nationalists?
How many of them welcomed back the Americans and sought American
help instead of fighting with Filipino peasants and students in
defending the national patrimony especially after the U.S. imposed
the unequal treaties on us? How many sought the assistance of Washington
against Marcos or sought refuge in America to fight the dictator
while enjoying a meal of roast beef (he was despicable, but I do
agree with the late Doroy Valencia when he labeled the Lopezes “steak
commandos”).
Second, Professor
Roces does not read very well. Nowhere in my suggestion for a Philippine-American
comparison did I argue that the latter be the “model.” Roces is
confusing concepts here: a model more or less constitutes the heuristic
ideal of a political process, practice or configuration to which
a case study is often contrasted (often with the latter failing).
My comment refers more to a comparison of societies that appear
to have similar domestic political developments.
I suggested
that it might have been more meaningful for Roces if she not rest
content on arguing that the Philippines is like Latin America (but
then she actually does not give us examples of which Latin American
families approximate the Lopezes); that she might gain something
more interesting by training her lens towards comparing the Philippines
and its former colonial master.
For in the
United States, we see instances – especially at the turn-of-the-20th
century – where families with odious and suspicious backgrounds
successfully rise up the social ladder to become a major oligarchic
political clan. The Kennedys were a classic case, rising from traders
of illegal alcohol and lords of the Boston Irish patronage machine
into a family of diplomats, senators, congressmen and presidents.
Surely, Roces knows about this background since she claims to have
an American graduate school education. Roces also claims my insights
on American political families are “curious.” But really now, all
you need to do is recite the names of the leading political families
today and you will see the rich potential for comparison — the above
families, the Bushies, the Gores, the Rodmans, Rockefellers. And
we are only talking at the national political arena here.
Third, Roces
argues that her work is not derivative of Pasyon and Revolution
simply because hers is “about political behavior among the elite
in postwar Philippines and relies on empirical evidence from the
Lopez family history” whereas Ileto’s classic work is a “thesis
about peasant perceptions on the Philippine revolution [and] relies
heavily on literary interpretation.” Roces is barking up the wrong
tree here. My criticism is on her refusal to acknowledge the methodological
influence that Ileto’s work has had on her, and, worse, her inability
to adapt it so as to make her study of the Lopezes’ “discourses”
as a family more interesting to the reader. Discourse analysis and
interpretations either of peasant perceptions (as expressed through
the Pasyon) or the pronouncements of oligarchs like the Lopezes
means dealing with Ileto, and my great surprise is that Roces does
not even acknowledge this despite the immense popularity of Pasyon
and despite the fact that at one time the paths of these two scholars
crossed.
As for Resil
Mojares, Roces complains that his book came out in 1993 “three years
after my dissertation was submitted to the University of Michigan!”
Kinship Politics came out in 2001, eight years after the publication
of An Anarchy of Families where Mojares’ piece appears. Is Roces
then saying that between the times she submitted her dissertation,
the time Anarchy of Families appeared, and the time Kinship Politics
was published, she did not revise her dissertation? But she did
not, for a quick check of her bibliography does show she consulted
works that came out after 1990. So why, in the process of preparing
for the publication of Kinship Politics did she ignore Mojares account?
Did she revise or did she not? Her response is quite bizarre.
But perhaps
not totally unexpected.
For Roces is
someone whose works have frustrated many because of her inability
(to push her analyses further by probing deeper into the processes
and stories she studies. She is someone whose writings have been
taken to task for their theoretical shallowness and her refusal
to engage studies that compete with or contradict her own assertions.
A sample of these perturbed readers is worth citing here.
Norman G. Owen (Asian Studies,2000, Vol. 36, No. 1) notes that while
Roces may have a point in arguing that Katipunan women operated
as equal partners to their male counterparts, he nevertheless points
out correctly that while “such perceptions were and are held by
many Filipinos, yet it is hard to see where they vary significantly
from those of traditional patriarchy, in which a woman’s status
is regularly inscribed in terms of the men to whom she belongs.
It is interesting that when Gregoria de Jesus herself (according
to Roces) wrote her memoirs, ‘she chose to describe her role using
the male yardstick of what constitutes participating in the revolution,
for she saw her most important role as the to the time she performed
similar duties as the katipuneros.” Owen notes that if “women were,
indeed, operating in terms of a different value system, they do
not seem to have been particularly aware of it.” In short, Roces
really failed to think through her argument.
Prof. Leonora
Angeles who reviewed Roces’ other book Women, Power and Kinship
Politics: Female Power in Post-War Philippines (London, 1998) in
the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (October-December 1999)
observed that “Roces’ analysis of the gendered exercise of power
could have been enriched by a closer examination of how men and
male politicos in the Philippines view female politicians and women
in general (beyond “wine, women and song” stories, of course) to
help explain why Filipino women’s power within the domestic sphere,
and their being malakas (strong) within kinship alliance groups,
are not readily translated into official power in the public sphere.”
She adds: “What is clearly lost in Roces’ analysis is the need to
pay equal attention, not just to the limitations of official power
and maximization of the potentials and strengths of unofficial power,
but also to the possibilities and constraints in the use of official
power, especially by feminist politicians (both women and men) for
the empowerment of less privileged women. Roces could ask the pertinent
question of what Cory and Imelda — as president and as virtual president,
respectively — have done to improve the plight of Filipino women
in all spheres of life? What difference did a woman president make?
What difference do female politicians and state feminists (also
called feminist bureaucrats or femocrats) in the Philippines make?
But the next
paragraphs from Angeles’ brilliant review prove more devastating.
Writes the professor from the University of Vancouver: “While Roces
does not explicitly deny the negative effects of kinship-based politics
in Philippine political culture, she easily falls into the danger
of privileging, uncritically accepting, and thus conserving, the
dark side of kinship politics when she argues that “(w)hile traditional
kinship politics discouraged women from gaining official power,
at least women could be malakas as members of the kinship alliance
group”, whereas in radical organizations that are critical of kinship
politics, “women were marginalized from both official and unofficial
power (original emphasis)” (p. 192).” Angeles then concludes:
“The weakness in Roces’ conclusions about the desirability of kinship
politics in maintaining women’s exercise of unofficial power lies
in her (1) failure to distinguish between the different ends kinship
relations could be used, i.e. as a mechanism for the formation of
social capital useful in building horizontal networks of trust and
cooperation within a community, or the formation of political capital
useful for building vertical relations of patronage, and gaining
a foothold in the state; (2) inability to capture how parallel use
of kinship politics is exercised not just by women in the privileged
classes, but also by Filipino women peasants and other underprivileged
classes.”
Prof. Angeles
also informed me that Prof. Carol Sobritchea of the UP Women’s Center
reviewed the same book for Public Policy, a journal of the UP Center
for Integrative Development. Lack of time and space limitations
preclude me from adding Sobritchea’s critical observations, but
interested readers may want to check her essay at the CID’s publication
center.
Then again,
perhaps we should not expect much from Professor Roces. This is,
after all, the scholar who, in her review of a book on the CPP-NPA
I edited, described Mindanao as a “province of the Philippines.”
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