Modernity, Migration and Hybridity in American Colonial Davao
Patricia Irene Dacudao, PhD
Ateneo de Manila University
Dr. Patricia Irene Dacudao is Assistant Professor of the History Department, Ateneo de Manila University. She has taught courses on Philippine History, Research Methods, European History and Japanese History. In 2018, she obtained her Ph.D. in Asian Studies from Murdoch University, Australia and her current research interests include frontier, commodity and consumption histories. A recent publication is “Empire’s informal ties: Pioneer anthropologists in Davao, 1904-1916” in Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints (2020).
This paper studies the concept of modernity among Davao’s diverse inhabitants during the first half of the twentieth century by examining their consumption of magazines and movies. It was a time when the city and the region was rapidly growing, as migrants from all over the Philippines and from around the world settled in Davao to participate in the abaca boom. This made Davao a contact zone of cultures from both East and West.
Through magazines and movies, Davao peoples came to understand what and how it was to be modern. This common understanding of modernity, as mediated by these mass-produced visual objects of popular culture, transpired in relative distance from the metropole. The distance was long enough to enable inhabitants to form their own concept of the modern through their lived experiences in a far-flung frontier contact zone. So much so, that a modern hybrid culture was created. American colonial Davao grew based on a population of multi-national migrants with a large Filipino majority, bringing with them different ideas and cultural traditions. This cultural diversity could have resulted to chaos, but rather, a relatively peaceful amalgamation happened. This paper argues that their diversity was tempered by the collective experience of consuming common objects of culture, such as magazines and movies. In turn, these popular objects created a hybrid culture that espoused the common values of modernity yet allowed for and acknowledged cultural differences.
Renegotiating Agency and Modernity among Childbirth Practitioners in the Reconstruction of the Medicine and Public Health Institutions in American Period
Alvin D. Cabalquinto
Ateneo de Manila University
Alvin D. Cabalquinto is a lecturer in the Department of History, School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University. He is currently finishing his graduate studies, MA in History, in the same university. His research interests include history of health and medicine, cultural history, transnational histories.
Recent studies on the history of the medicine and public health in the Philippines have focused on biopolitics of the colonized bodies through various disease outbreaks that occurred during the beginning of the American colonial period. As these studies suggest, a key theme in these studies is the perception that the American medicine and public health institutions established within this period reinforced the racial discourse of the civilizing nature of American tutelage democracy through the various modes of scientific and technological transfers from American to Filipino medical practitioners. While the discourse on these studies have shown the racialized ways of knowledge-production and the power dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized in disease outbreaks, an emerging perspective on the nature of this power dynamics is the agential aspect of reestablishing modes of medicine and health in the context of various existing modes of medicine and public health within the Philippines.
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This paper attempts to show the various ways of changing views and practices of childbirth in the context of changes within the institutions of medicine and public health in American period Philippines. By examining official sources and writings of the medical practitioners, this paper seeks to study the agency of American and Filipino medical practitioners through the restrictions in child birth delivery and emergence of studies and medical specializations in the reconstitution of the medicine and public health in the Philippines within the context of modernity and its various meanings.
Modernity and Plague in Southeast Asia: The Outbreak in Colonial Java and Manila
Diego Rebato, Jr.
Ateneo de Manila University
Diego F. Rebato Jr. is a lecturer from the Department of History of Ateneo de Manila University. He is currently taking up his Master of Arts in History at the University of the Philippines Diliman specializing on social history and social movements.
The outbreak of the third plague pandemic in the late nineteenth century alarmed many colonial powers leading to the introduction of measures that were not yet seen during the first two pandemics. This paper narrates the cases of Java and Manila side-by-side. Compared to the outbreak in Manila, Java was far more affected. Although plague was not the primary foe of Dutch health administrators, it became a concern because of its effects with over 200,000 related casualties. It is thus the aim of this treatise to determine the factors leading Java to its vulnerability to the contagion. Furthermore, the narrative focuses on the spread and responses of colonial subjects and masters which constituted a significant fragment of Dutch and American colonial health programs.
The rhetoric of modernity as it manifested in the implementation of these policies was pivotal to the establishment of a colonial order. The bereft of the narrations on the plague outbreaks on the works recent of scholars like Warwick Anderson, Ma. Mercedes Planta, Reynaldo Ileto, among others who mention public health as an essential aspect of building a colonial project is one gap that this paper is aiming to fill in. The challenges and responses of these plights were rendered with the discourse of modernity whether the epidemic was clement, in the case of Manila, or catastrophic like that of Java.
Modernization, Risk and Migration: South Korean Migration to the Philippines
Neville Jay Manaois
Ateneo de Manila University
Neville Jay Manaois, is an instructor at the History Department, Ateneo De Manila University. He is currently on leave pursuing his PhD degree in sociology at La Trobe University Melbourne Australia. His area of research focuses on Philippines and the Korean War, Korean History and Korean migration to the Philippines.
South Korea, emerge to become an economic powerhouse in the 1990’s 30-40, it achieved one of the fastest developments and economic progress the world has ever seen, it was labeled as a miracle. Today Korea is one of the most powerful countries in the world which has influence in culture, economy, and development. Modernization in Korea is in a rapid pace and it is constantly increasing pace to economic progress and development. Alongside this modernization there seems to be an apparent growth in Korean migration to the Philippines. The Philippines has a higher number of Korean migrants than more developed countries like Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, United Kingdom and Thailand to name some. To date there are about 80,000 Koreans migrants in the Philippines and there were close to 1.8 million Koreans who visited the Philippines in 2019. Koreans from a highly modernized and globalized society decided to migrate to the Philippines. What could possibly explain this situation? This paper presents how Korean migration to the Philippines became a response towards the risk brought about by modernity in Korea.