Reimagining Paglalakbay sa Kapuluan (Journeying the Archipelago) as an Academic
(Ode to the 44th UGAT Conference in Marinduque State College, October 26-28, 2022))
Part 1
A day before the conference. One of the most important things I learn about traveling around the Philippines is that time is fluid; travel time is fluid. This means that ferries, planes, and other modes of transportation are subject to factors no one can control. After several experiences of running after buses and embarking on the wrong boat bound to someplace, I should not be, I have become accepting of the reality that time is entirely mystical. I am here waiting for the ferry to sail to Marinduque from the Port of Lucena. The ticket booth person said that the sailing time was 10 AM. The crew on the ferry told me it would leave at Noon. Yes, I am exactly where I should be at this place and time.
Lucena City Port. Photograph by Jeane Peracullo
Field Notes
Marinduque is beautiful, but the Boac and Mompog Rivers break my heart. I do not want to see images of devastation and suffering. I cannot even bear to sit thru a presentation about prehistoric tigers that are long gone. Yet I have to confront my fears and face the heartbreaking state of the Boac River.
Like the Pansipit River, the Boac River defines a place; I could imagine how it used to be so majestic.
The theme of devastation permeates the UGAT conference. It is so because destruction, danger, difficulty, and nihilism seem to mark the existence of marginalized Filipinos in their country. When we hear and research small stories, they seem de facto, almost a given in the present-time Philippines.
Nevertheless, here I am. I, too, look for small stories. I am in Philosophy, but I am never drawn to the classical methodology that does not recognize context.
I am always on the ground.
The ground tells of several small narratives.
I tell stories of hope, resilience, adaptations, power, resistance, and subversion.
Rural Setting in front of Marina Marinduque Hotel. Photograph by Jeane Peracullo
The other theme that was meaningful to me, and what I do, is documenting and celebrating thriving communities amid precarity and vulnerability.
How to do that? I’ve learned from the conference: I must actively look for them. Most often, they are in liminal spaces, the spaces of in-between, but not necessarily in cyberspace. Liminal space, deeply rooted in material spaces, is an imagined space between an existence marked by precarity and flourishing.
Anthropologists must actively and adequately locate a human subject within the intricate, complex, entangled relationships that define their lived experiences. I respect the task; I honor the commitment.
I wrote about resistance, which I defined as having the space to “move” and having “the ability to create” an area to move. In other words, mobility, both at micro and macro levels, is a profound act of resistance. All living beings on Earth move. For survival, for flourishing.
The thing about humans is that ideologies that have become oppressive structures imprison us, rendering the thought of resistance futile.
The other thing about humans is that we can rise above these ideologies and see them for what they are: chains to restrict our mobility. And I believe these thriving communities are here in our midst, telling us that there are many ways to see reality.
The depth of perception that allows us to see intersubjectivity can become a powerful tool to appreciate the strategies of survival, coping, resistance, and flourishing.
Beach in Balaring, Boac. Photograph by Jeane Peracullo
Vulnerable Therapeutic Waterspaces of Virgen de Caysasay
My latest article in Etnoloska Tribina (Ethnological Tribune) Volume 51 No. 44 (2021) https://hrcak.srce.hr/ojs/index.php/etnoloska-tribina
https://hrcak.srce.hr/ojs/index.php/etnoloska-tribina/article/view/20436
The Virgen de Caysasay is one of the oldest manifestations of the Virgin Mary in the Philippines. According to popular belief, a fisherman netted her statue in the Pansipit River in 1603. Many miraculous healing events, mostly involving water, have been attributed to her. Despite the devastating effects of the climate crisis, Caysasay water spaces endure as therapeutic, healing, and ritual places. This essay examines the interlocking dynamics and vulnerabilities of bodies of water associated with the Virgen de Caysasay, their contextual sacred spaces where pieties are performed, and their surrounding communities.
Keywords: Therapeutic water spaces, the performance of piety, healing, sacred water
The Sta Lucia Well. Photograph by Jeane Peracullo
In 2021, the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines will celebrate its 500-year presence in the country. However, despite the preponderance of springs and the centuries-long exposure to Catholicism, there is no research on the holy springs in the Philippines as has been conducted, for example, in Ireland (Foley 2010; Ray 2014) or elsewhere (Ray 2020). In his study on the therapeutic aspects of the Irish holy wells, Ronan Foley believed that wells could be sites of indigenous health and a resource for a native population lacking modern medical resources due to their limited access to Western medical interventions (Foley 2010: 477).
Despite the vulnerable states of waterscapes connected to the Virgen de Caysasay, pilgrims continue to enact devotional practices on site. The cure or therapy occurs
in the embodied performance of piety (Baring et al. 2017; Peracullo et al. 2019), regardless of the lack of scientific evidence (Ingman et al. 2016; Perriam 2015), and through the medicinal plants and the curative aspects of water (Ray 2014; Foley 2010) that make up the Caysasay water spaces.
Caysasay water spaces as therapeutic
Foley (2010) posited that there is more than meets the eye in the designation of a particular well, spring, river, or lake as a therapeutic space by the communities in areas where these water features can be found. Can they be transformed into medicine? Traditional or indigenous health-seeking practices rely on water (as well as the flora and fauna) that exist, perhaps in abundance, in areas where people regularly encounter them as they forage for food or medicine (Ong et al., 2014; Lacuna- Richman, 2004). Similarly, Perriam had noted that specific holy wells and pools have significance for certain disorders, such as skin conditions or mental health problems, where healing has been historically recorded and observed (2015: 28).
Scientists have studied the active Taal Volcano and its lake because of its sheer abundance of biodiversity. However, most of the scientific research that came out after the American occupation of the Philippines largely concentrated on aquaculture, rather than the flora and fauna that make up the Taal Volcano Protected Landscape. As a consequence of this scientific neglect, there is no relevant study or research offering evidence about the therapeutic properties of specific flora and fauna that are common in the Caysasay sacred water spaces.
Pansipit River before the 2020 Taal Volcano Eruption. Photograph by Jeane Peracullo
The sacralization process as therapeutic
According to Rito Baring et al. (2017), Filipinos meaningfully understand the concept of sacred as operating within the parameters of banal (Eng. Holy), maganda (Eng. Beautiful), and ritwal (Eng. Ritual) – inclusive of both religious and non-religious categories. Sacralization is an ongoing, active process involving doing something, such as participating in the regulation of relationships and boundaries (Ingman et al. 2016: 11).
The performance of pieties that surround the Virgen de Caysasay persists even to the present day because the encounter with the sacred is a conditioned response to experience and expectations (such as healing) that is inherent in each act of pilgrimage, participation in a fluvial procession, dancing the subli, and bathing and drinking the waters of the well. In the same way, Ray claimed that we see in the Irish holy well tradition an enduring perception of the supernatural presence in particular places with springs or wells (Ray 2014: 113).
Virgen de Caysasay Devotees leave flowers at the Sta. Lucia Well. Photo by Jeane Peracullo
The healing process for devotees of the Virgen closes with the ritual performance of gratitude. At the St. Lucia Well, dried flower bouquets lined the walls adjacent to the twin wells. Occasionally, fresh flowers would appear in their midst. The flowers (and plastic rosaries) are material artifacts that devotees of the Virgen de Caysasay offer as tokens of gratitude for an answered prayer or a “miraculous” cure through the inter- cession of the Virgen. Just like their Irish counterparts, devotees regard these artifacts as ritual performances (buying and selecting the flowers or rosaries from the store of the shrine, lighting a candle, and leaving them at the St. Lucia Well).
Conclusion
Past and present health-seeking practices, especially of those without access to mainstream medicine, and the narratives or stories of healing point to the continuing significance of belief, faith, and religion to any meaningful discourse on healing. The designation of spaces as “sacred” reveals peoples’ active involvement in their well-being. In the Philippines, a tuklong (a makeshift altar) for the image of a deity is used to mark indigenous sacred sites. These tuklongs mark the actual physical places that were sacred long before the foreign missionaries would have declared them to be so upon the discovery of a statue of Mary or a cross. The tuklong can be seen as what Christina Fredengen has called “tribal nodes” (Fredengen 2002: 174–8; Ray 2014: 83).
Taal Lake, the Pansipit River, and the St. Lucia Wells are the actual material spaces in the origin story of the Virgen de Caysasay. As such, the Caysasay water spaces are the living, albeit vulnerable repositories of cultural memory. The devotees of the Virgen de Caysasay regard these sacred waters as part of the physical and spiritual therapeutic landscapes. In Senses of Place, Steven Field and Keith Basso stipulated that “place is the most fundamental form of embodied experience. It is the site of powerful fusion of self, space, and time” (1996: 10). The work for devotees, be it those who reside in the community or those who journey from elsewhere to visit the Virgen, is to always remember the origin story of the Virgen de Caysasay and how she is firmly rooted in these sacred watery spaces that continue to provide them with resources for healing.
Exploring the Challenging Interactions between Humans and Animals
My Ethics students reflected on the many challenging interactions between humans animals. Here are some of their advocacy and awareness campaigns:
The Church Ruins of Camiguin
Jeane C. Peracullo, 2011
I wrote this little ode to the church ruins in Camiguin Island back in 2011. It was my first visit to the island in particular and the Mindanao region in general.
Two volcanoes loom over stone columns
Those are the remains of a once-proud church
That crumbled down in 1871.
The rumblings rang in the ears of the frightened people.
The sound much louder than the peals of its bells
Which, in its special tower, announced the eruption of a volcano.
The volcano spawn and thrown red-hot rocks
Some hit the majestic church
And in a short while
The church crumbled into pieces
And soon after, spent by its violent wracking,
Quieted down to sleep for two centuries.
The two columns stood witness to the majesty of the once-proud church.
I entered the church ruins reverently as I would a cathedral.
The stone columns stand as a grim reminder of the island’s violent past
They are a constant testament to the danger of living
Under the looming presence of the volcanoes that surround the island.
Inside was a clearing. There was a Zen-like feel to it.
The church ruins surrounded the clearing, which was green with lush grass.
The whole atmosphere was almost peaceful.
The sound of the crashing waves from the nearby sea
Added to its other-worldly serenity.
Glancing up, my gaze encountered a volcano, which was now dormant
Sleeping, but not dead yet.
And another volcano demanded my attention.
The same one that erupted more than 600 years ago
Now asleep, but active.
And would wake up again sometime in the future.
Meanwhile, it was taking its own sweet time
Looming over the ruins of a once-proud, majestic church.
Towards a Corporeal Phenomenology
Sunset at El Nido, Palawan, Photo by Jeane Peracullo
Introduction
In Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Merleau-Ponty sought to rediscover the body. He coined the word “lived” body to demonstrate its active involvement in the world. Perception is usually understood as an act of seeing—a physiological activity. When one perceives, however, seeing is not the first act. One does not “see” (the act is not to see only. It also involves other senses like smell, touch, hear) something as if that something stands independently of the self. Every seeing involves interpretation; in this case, the “seeing” is always mediated by paradigm one assumes. We can say that seeing-interpreting is part of perception. This means that the act of perceiving is not just cognitive alone. Merleau-Ponty claimed that perception is first and foremost embodied. Embodied knowing is not just cognitive; it involves the totality of the person including one’s psychological and emotional makeup; one’s social location (upper-middle class, middle class, etc.); and one’s gender and sexual preferences and orientation.
The depth of perception also highlights intersubjectivity. Since I perceive the world, the world perceives me as well, which gives rise to mutual recognition of our existence. For Merleau-Ponty, acquiring a depth of perception starts when one gives a direct description of one’s experience as it is, without offering causal explanations or interpretive generalizations of the experience.
Merleau-Ponty on the World of Perception & Science (1948)
The Spell of the Sensuous
David Abram lamented the loss of our dependence on other senses because of our over-reliance on the sense of sight. The western way of knowing is based primarily on the eye. The importance accorded to the eye is based on its immediacy with the pursuit of objectivity or pure knowledge. The supremacy of the eye over other faculties like touch, smell, and taste, rests on it is not messy, that is, it is freed from the bodily contaminants, which the other senses are subjected to. The eye is freed from bodily involvements while the other senses are more attuned with being alive, the eye, being detached gives the illusion of domination and control. This all-seeing arrogant eye establishes subject-object dualism, which results in the loss of awareness of interdependence, as well as, the refusal to acknowledge differences.
The Primacy of Touch
Touch is a source of knowledge that is at once more detailed and more stable than vision. With tactile confirmation, people are more secure in trusting their visual perspective. Touch exists in a continuum with sight and hearing. Touch attests the embodiment of the other, hearing allows the other to be listened to attentively and responsively, sight confirms the other like a relational, embodied being in its peculiarity and difference. Touch as a key sense then, emphasizes the relational aspect of who we are. It leads us to the truth that we exist in interrelationship with other subjects. It recognizes that boundaries exist between the self and the other, that interests of other persons (and the natural world) are not identical to one’s own, that knowing another takes time and attention. Touch then as the primary sense—probing, exploratory, taking in the particularity of each thing rejects the eye—which has begun to symbolize the detached, dominating and oppressing stance of “objective” knowledge.
We need to be re-acquainted with our senses and to be re-acquainted with nature! Listen to David Abram’s narration of the excerpt of his book, The Spell of the Sensuous.
According to Abram, “To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. And to see the world is also, at the same time, to experience oneself as visible, to feel oneself seen. Clearly, a wholly immaterial mind could neither see things nor touch things—indeed, could not experience anything at all. We can experience things—can touch, hear, and taste things—only because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds, and tastes. We can perceive things at all only because we ourselves are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive! We might as well say that we are organs of this world, the flesh of its flesh and that the world is perceiving itself through us.”
Acquiring the Depth of Perception
“The rustling of leaves in an oak tree or an aspen grove is itself a kind of a voice.”
“The rhythm and lilt of the local landscape.”
For Abram, deepening our perception means that we can begin to hear nature’s voice in the cacophony of sounds of the sheer diverse beings that make up the Earth.
Indigenous local cultures with their rich oral traditions have, across millennia, celebrated the complex relationships humans have with nonhuman animals and nonhuman beings in their midst.
“The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth .” (SS, 7).
Earth Talk: A Few Qualities Common to Traditionally Oral, Indigenous Cultures – David Abram
Towards a Corporeal Phenomenology
Just like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist, Gaston Bachelard’s deep and enduring love for the natural world is palpable. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard utilizes the poets’ extraordinary perceptual access to both the visible and invisible worlds, to construct what he calls a “concrete metaphysics.”
The term, concreteness does not only refer to the obvious physical parameters of a space or a being. It refers as well to the imagined contours of such a space or a being that extends to encompass the entire breadth and utmost depths of the universe, and all the way up to the heavens. For what is “inside” or “outside” in everyday language, but the rigidity of perception and poverty of the imagination?
The poetics of space calls for a deep appreciation of the perfection of beings that surround us, their absolute roundness, for they do not have the inside or outside (that we humans use to denote margins, and to some extent, connotations of exclusions and inclusions). He has said it best: roundness invites caresses. The roundness may refer to the shape of the earth itself, for it envelops everything in it.
The tree is the embodiment of this concrete metaphysics (1964, 240). But the tree is not just the tree that is immediately before our very eyes; the tree is also a witness or a testament to the immensity of the forest (1964, 185) that lies beyond the phenomenal field. Just because you cannot see it, it does not mean that it is not there, or that it does not exist. However, for Bachelard, “the immensity” goes even further than the geographical information that we may have. Through the eyes of a poet, the space acquires extraordinary depth and breadth.
The Poetics of Space does not call for nostalgia. It points more towards the acquisition of the depth of perception that will empower us to see that the current state of being of a thing is the thing itself-—-as it is in the present, or the here and now. Bachelard issues a dire warning: “Soon, if we do not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are (1964, 185).”
cafe public intellectual 