Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The Foreign and Familiar

The Foreign and Familiar

You have come to our country at a most exciting time, though at a somewhat awkward stage, when we are negotiating the challenging transition from a traditional order to a progressive humanist society. This new complex of buildings erected on land reclaimed from the sea stands in dramatic contrast to the slum areas that blight our city. The contrast of shrine and shanty symbolizes the shining future against our impoverished past.
-Imelda Marcos, October 1976

In speaking these words, Imelda Marcos, first lady and governor of Metropolitan Manila, attempted to articulate the Marcos government’s self-perceived position of leadership in the third world. In hopes of impressing the thousands of delegates visiting for the 1976 annual International Monetary Fund-World Bank meeting, the Marcos government erected fifteen new luxury hotels, a new international airport, and a state of the art convention center. Just four years earlier, President Ferdinand Marcos had declared a state of emergency, citing what he felt was a need to hold together an unraveling nation. The declaration of martial law led to the repression of civil rights, increase in police and military surveillance and activity, and the Marcos monopolization of key industries, such as energy, communications, and construction. These dictatorial actions did not deter foreign investors, who actually welcomed the economic and political security that the Marcos government advertised. So as host of the IMF-WB annual meeting, the Marcos government hoped to image the modern Philippine nation at the forefront of the developing third world. To structure this representation more than $500 million in foreign loans were utilized for construction, over 10,000 urban squatters were removed, and numbers of those imprisoned because of political opposition to the government swelled to 20,000.

No doubt, returning to the opening passage, the “shining future” that Imelda Marcos alludes to is manifest in the cosmetic reorganization of Manila preceding the IMF-WB meeting. Furthermore the “new complex of buildings erected on land reclaimed from the sea” demonstrates the Philippine’s modern mastery over nature. And yet it is her “contrast of shrine and shanty” as demonstrative of this “shining future” that reveals the spatial and temporal paradox of the developing Philippine nation-state. The paradox is this: in order to demonstrate its development, the Philippines must constantly set its course toward the modern “shining future” (progressive humanist society) by juxtaposing its present (shrine and shanty) against its cultural past (traditional order). And yet from recent scholarship on the nation, the seemingly paradoxical preservation of national culture is in actuality essential to the future of the modern nation-state.

To expand this argument let us briefly look to the intimate relationship between History and nation in Prasenjit Duara’s seminal text Rescuing History from the Nation. Duara asserts that during the 18th century, co-constitutive of modern History is the emergence of the nation as the dominant vehicle in which to project the self-aware subject. History thus evolves as the essential technology utilized by the state in order to appropriate diverging contingencies of the emerging nation. Moreover, key in understanding this process is the prevailing hegemonic belief that “modern History is meaningless” without a methodological subject, “that which remains even as it changes.” Thus, the emerging modern nation-state along with modern national leaders (who draw on discourses of what Duara calls the people-nation) can only legitimately claim its “privilege and sovereignty” by becoming the only “subject of History.” In other words the nation-state can only assert its right to sovereignty through its construction of a primordial origin: culture. Thus culture, vestige of the natural, traditional, and the pre-modern, and in the case of the Philippines, pre-colonial past, must be spatialized and protected. This protection is achieved through the evolutionary narrative of History, in which all memories and contingencies become collapsed into one teleological narrative. It is also, as I will demonstrate through the construction projects of the Marcos government, integrated into the material structures of the public space.

The construction project leading up to the IMF-WB was not an isolated surge of productivity. Rather the 1970s in the Philippines must be seen as a decade saturated with large scale construction projects. Powered by foreign loans, large scale construction projects were not only marked by the aforementioned luxury housing and airport constructions or the expanding network of roads, urban buildings, and state of the art hospitals, but also cultural exhibit halls. The Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Museum of Philippine Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and the Museum of Philippine Costumes were some of the most notable and most accessible large scale projects undertaken by the post-Martial Law government. Clustered together in an interlocking network built on the previously mentioned “reclaimed” Manila Bay, they eventually came to be known as the Cultural Center of the Philippines Complex (CCPC). Intended for the public gaze, the CCPC’s exhibits consciously invoked a multiplicity of elements from various ethnic groups throughout the Philippines’s history and territory. The range included various contemporary ethnic minorities such as the indigenous tribes of Northern Luzon or the Muslim communities of Mindanao to the pre-colonial remnants of ancient Malay societies. For example the Nayong Pilipino, a cultural theme park built in 1972, displayed the most prominent ethnic groups of the archipelago. The exhibits systematically presented the customs, traditions, costumes, and “tribal facial features” of each ethnic group. Interspersed with these representations of people were scaled down recreations of familiar geological landmarks, such as the “Ifugao Rice Terraces, the Mayon Volcano, the Chocolate Hills of Bohol, and Lanao Lake.” Thus a spatializing effect occurs. This system of display collapses the spatial and temporal boundaries separating the contemporary ethnic groups and their ‘native habitats’ into the simplified space of the Historical past. In addition designs meant to invoke traditional culture such as the bahay kubo or the roof shaped like a salakot, to the frequent use of the pre-modern alphabet baybayin, were built into the architecture. Even the construction material, material such as coconut tree lumber, was consciously utilized in order to celebrate the native. In sum the Marcos government’s design and construction of these structures, the use of symbols, the subjects of exhibition, and the very material itself used to house these exhibits, culled from ‘traditional’ Philippine cultural symbols both past and present in order to present the state as both promoter and protector of national culture.
And yet, returning to Duara, integral to the nation-state’s claim to sovereignty is the promise of the future. Duara explains this process further.

Thus while on the one hand, nation-states glorify the ancient or eternal character of the nation, they also seek to emphasize the unprecedented nature of the nation-state, because it is only in this form that the people-nation has been able to realize itself as the self-conscious subject of History.

It is this self-realization that positions the nation-state to “launch into a modern future” in which all diverging memories and contingencies would be eventually, at the end of History, sublimated. The nation is thus presented “simultaneously as essentially atavistic and unprecedentedly novel.” In other words, key to its existence, the modern nation-state must sublate “the other in the self.”

For the Marcos government the modern could only be articulated as the West, or better put: the foreign. Hence, through the integration of Western inspired architectural design, modern construction material, the purchase of art from ‘ancient’ civilizations and ‘classical’ societies, and in addition by receiving funds from foreign capital and by displaying ‘traditional culture’ to tourist gazes, the foreign was embedded in and combined with the familiarity of culture. Therefore, the Marcos government, through its large scale constructions of the 1970s, in particular the public-aimed cultural centers, consciously built and displayed the contrasting foreign in the familiar. Thus, the “awkward stage” of “shrine and shanty” cannot be seen as the paradox of the developing third world nation, but rather as a co-constitutive relationship essential to the modern nation-state’s future.

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