Romancing the sword (3)

In most countries, the collective past is painstakingly preserved in history books, research publications, archives and museums. There are monuments, restored ruins, tombs and landmarks, paintings and prints, bas reliefs, dioramas. There are even live and filmed reenactments, usually on the very sites where memorable events happened.

Some of the most romanticized events and figures of a nation’s history, rightly or wrongly, have to do with wars and revolutions. It is as if the emergence of a nation or a hero required bloodshed, like a person’s birth and passage to adulthood.

This is understandable. After all, most nations were actually born and steeled into maturity in the throes of such violent crises. Many national heroes have emerged as leaders in such conflicts.

The problem begins, however, when the public is fed mostly with over-romanticized notions of war and combat heroics, while only the military establishment is given the chance to study real strategy and tactics.

It is one thing to romanticize armies and wars. It is another thing to educate the public in military science and history so they can cope better in a real war.

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Take for instance Scottish national hero William Wallace and French national heroine Joan d’Arc, and their roles in their countries’ respective wars of liberation against English occupation in the Middle Ages.

Braveheart, a realistic portrayal of the Scottish struggle, and the two Joan of Arc films I mentioned earlier, despite their historical inaccuracies, are okay enough for starters. But here are two cases where the heroes loom much bigger in real life than in the romanticized Hollywood versions.

Try to do an Internet search on the two historical figures. You’ll be amazed at the tremendous amount of historical detail available, whether online or in libraries, archives and museums, about their exploits as real-life political-military leaders.

The actual battles they waged and won are analyzed in terms of battle formations, weapons and tactics. Their battles are also analyzed in the context of the entire war and their impact on the wider theater of politics.

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As Filipinos, are we exerting the same effort to study the history of our own nation’s wars and revolutions? Do we have a comprehensive picture of how our ancestors battled foreign invaders with indigenous weapons and tactics? Is this knowledge popularized in films and other mass media?

For example, how much do we really know about the tactics and weapons with which Lapu-lapu waged and won the famous Battle of Mactan? Have we separated hard documented fact from mere speculation and outright fiction – like when Lapu-lapu was supposed to have instructed his men to strike at the joints of Spanish soldiers, where their armor was weakest?

Through a quick check of sources, I realized that there are several extant eyewitness accounts of the Magellan expedition, yet the only popularized account of the Mactan battle is that of Pigafetta, the expedition chronicler.

Aside from its obvious colonizer’s bias, Pigafetta’s account is so sparse in detail that some would doubt if he really witnessed the battle; perhaps he simply wrote down what Magellan’s surviving lieutenants told him.

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Even without detailed accounts of battles against the Spanish invaders, we could still try to reconstruct our ancestors’ military capacities. We could use other methods of history and archeology, such as those employed in Scott’s Cracks in the Parchment Curtain.

In his book Barangay: 16th Century Philippine Culture and Society, Scott actually devoted an entire chapter on this subject, “Weapons and War” (in Part One, The Visayas) and substantial sections as well in other chapters.

But the question remains: how much of this is reflected in local story books, films, and websites? Not much, I’m afraid.

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For some time now, I’ve been combing the city’s video stores and sidewalk stalls for a VCD of Lito Lapid’s 2002 film Lapu-lapu – the only cinematic account of the Mactan battle as far as I know.

Although a box office flop, Lapu-lapu garnered the FAP Best Picture award. Recreating an entire coastal village and a full-sized Spanish sailing ship and utilizing 3,000 extras, this lavish film was touted to be worth the P35 million it took to produce it.

Oddly, I couldn’t find a copy. Maybe I didn’t search hard enough. Yet, in almost every stall where I looked, there were rows of VCDs about fake superheroes like Lastikman, Captain Barbell, and Anak ng Panday. This only shows the local film industry’s awful sense of history.

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My intent in reviewing Lapu-lapu was to check my own bias against most local films about pre-modern wars – insofar as we ever made films about pre-modern wars, anyway. We couldn’t even get the most obvious historical details right, such as what our ancestors wore for battle, what their war boats and weapons looked like, and what combat formations or ruses they adopted.

I expected Lapid to disprove my theory. After all, his film was supposed to have relied on research provided by the UP Dept. of History. Now since I couldn’t find a VCD copy, I had to rely on other reviews. Many of them were harsh, some writing off the movie as a poor imitation of Braveheart.

Here’s a sampling from Ambeth Ocampo’s history column in Inquirer: “Lito Lapid was not wearing the historically correct costume. He carries a bad copy of a Kalinga shield when one can order a good reproduction and cheaply, from Baguio City souvenir shops.”

More than that, Ocampo said, Lapu-lapu carried his Cordillera shield upside down. Ay apo, kababain.

But I’m suspending my judgment of the Lapid obra maestra until I get hold of a copy and watch it myself.

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Meanwhile, should we urge local producers to ride on the recent “sword-and-sandal” hits from Hollywood? After Lapu-lapu’s box office dud, should we hope that another filmmaker will dare tackle the Dagohoy rebellion, or Sultan Kudarat’s exploits, or Amkidit’s resistance, or Raja Sulayman’s defense of Maynilad?

“I’m afraid I can’t wait that long,” said Kabsat Kandu, as he checked the time and channel for his favorite sword-and-sorcery TV series. The force of Encantadia is strong in my neighbor.

“But wait,” I said, hitting the TV remote back to the National Geographic channel, where a film reenactment of the classic Battle of Thermopylae was being shown. “There is hope on the horizon.”

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In many Western countries, there are historical societies and military-style clubs that research ancient tactics and reenact battles of yore as realistically as possible. Often, their people are hired as military consultants, fight choreographers or stunt crews for war films.

It is their fanatic passion for military detail that provides a cinematic realism so authentic that even director and crew are spellbound as the choreographed carnage unfolds before the camera.

I know at least one similar effort here. In the past few years, Lapu-lapu City (on Mactan island, now part of Metro Cebu) has held an annual reenactment of the Battle of Mactan. The cast is composed of 400-plus bit actors from Mactan barangays and arnis enthusiasts of the Mactan Island Eskrima Alliance. I heard they were also involved in the filming of Lapu-lapu.

Maybe local and overseas enthusiasts of arnis and its many variations, from ancient kali and pangamot sword-fighting styles, down to the modern sinawali, doce methodos and lameco escrima, should expand their efforts to include wider areas of native military science and historical preservation.

And that leads us to the concluding part next week of this over-extended romance with swords. #


From: Northern Dispatch Weekly, 14 August 2005

Romancing the sword (2)

War, that most horrible practice invented and mastered by humanity, remains nevertheless a fascinating subject in literature and art throughout the ages.

It is as though the immense guilt of organizing mutual slaughter, the utter pain of violent death, the terror of close-quarters combat, can be easily exorcised through literature, painting and sculpture, music and theater, games, and in our day, through film.

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I fell into such a morbid fascination with war at a young age. I guess it was expected of most boys of our generation. After all, we read about war in comic books and trading cards (teks before the cellphone era). We watched it on TV as regular weekend fare – remember Vic Morrow as Sgt. Saunders in the TV series Combat? We played with toy guns and swords, and formed teams that competed in street-wide war games using slingshots and paper pellets.

My childhood obsession with vicarious war ran deeper. At 10, my most treasured books were several military books given by older cousins: a US ROTC training manual, a US Army manual of artillery and infantry weapons, and a two-volume compilation of World War II stories.

I devoured all the stories, and spent long hours mentally playing out the battles, complete with intricate tactical maneuvers that I thought must have been second nature to infantry COs. From high school onwards, a modest allowance enabled me to buy more books on world war history and to watch more war films on the big screen.

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It took some effort on my part to stare at real-life photos of dead soldiers, twisted as they were into grotesque poses, and staring back at me with dreamy eyes half-closed. Some post-combat scenes replay themselves with persistence inside my head, such as that of a wounded grunt who turns incongruently talkative as others deperately patch his bleeding chest, until he lapses into shock and dies in the arms of his comrades. (This “soldier’s death up close” sub-genre is explored to the fullest in Platoon and Saving Private Ryan.)

Nothing prepared me, however, for the full-adrenalin scenes of massed sword battles and close-up carnage pioneered by Alfred the Great (1969) and later perfected by the recent batch of sword-and-sandal, sword-and-armor, and sword-and-sorcery films (Braveheart, Joan of Arc, Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Last Samurai, Kingdom of Heaven, et al.).

Even with repeated viewings, they never fail to wrench me deep in the guts – the way war drums and battle yells signal the start of the massed assault by phalanxes of sword and spear, accompanied by thunderous hoofs of cavalry, all in a mad dash towards a deafening crash as the two opposing waves of armored soldiery consume each other.

With racing heartbeat and sweating palms, I grip my viewer’s seat and watch every excruciating detail. Sharp steel hacking into flesh and bone. Body parts heaved asunder by the sheer impact. Croaks and groans of sweating, grappling, dying men. The nauseous sight of butchery on the dusty ground.

It is as if I am a futuristic reporter in the middle of the battle, barely shielded from the carnage by a timewarp bubble. But I force myself to watch it all.

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Now, modern conventional wars are generally more violent than ancient wars, in the extent of death and destruction.

On D-Day alone of the 1944 Allied invasion in France, terrifyingly depicted in the film Saving Private Ryan, most estimates (none of them exact) place total Allied dead at around 5,000, German dead at about 10,000, and French civilian dead (mostly through Allied bombings of Norman cities and towns) at a whooping 19,000.

In comparison, in the famous Battle of Stirling Bridge where Scottish forces under Wallace slaughtered the medieval English army, the total casualty was less than 6,000 killed (mostly English, plus some Scots and local civilians).

Yet why does it seem that movie scenes of sword battles affect us more than those of modern firefights? Why do most of us flinch and turn our eyes away from scenes of blades or points piercing flesh, but not so much when movie soldiers are hit by bullets or shrapnel? I don’t know about you, but at least it does so in my case.

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While we try to search our collective psyche for scientific reasons, let me offer a simplistic explanation:

When we were kids (and up to now among rural children), handling bolos, knives and other bladed or pointed tools for daily chores was a routine skill. Accidental cuts and pricks were not uncommon. We were familiar with the pain and blood. Sooner or later, most of us learned to avoid them, but the primal pain remained in our subconscious, as a constant reminder to wield our tools (or weapons) with great care.

In other words, more people have experienced injury by blade-like or spear-like objects, at some point in their lives, than people who have been wounded by bullets or shrapnel. The traumatic memory of the former is thus embedded in more people. I think it is this common pain that is so easily evoked by cinematic sword battles.

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Now here’s the twist.

I now observe less and less kids in the urban areas undergoing the same experience, with the routine use of knives relegated to the kitchen, especially to housewives. In a crowded city street, carrying a bolo no longer signifies that you’re a hard-working farmer; it makes you – in the eyes of cops at least – a potential criminal if not an outright crazed fanatic.

More and more, urban kids see the reality of swords and knives only in comics, films, play cards and computer games. They have only the barest idea of the physical skills and careful use that these tools (or weapons) require. Young generations are losing the normal caution and queasiness associated with sharp steel blades, and enjoying them more through movies and games suffused with surreal magic.

In short, swords and knives are increasingly receding from our reality and becoming more and more part of fantasy. To urban youth, our Muslim brothers are now seen not as fierce wielders of kris and kampilan, but of DVD and VCD.

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“Is that the reason why Encantadia is so popular now?” asked Kabsat Kandu.

My spunky neighbor is of course referring to the current GMA7 primetime blockbuster. This sword-and-sorcery series, reminiscent of the Lord of the Rings, is now becoming serious discussion theme even in university classes.

And he was exactly right on the mark. Elementary school kids now know a lot more about Princess Pirena than about Princess Urduja. They now know more about the magical kabilan than the historical kampilan. #

From: Northern Dispatch Weekly, 7 August 2005

Romancing the sword (1)

Last year, I got to writing a three-part piece on a most unlikely topic: fireplaces. The title, “Romancing the Fireplace,” had a nice medieval ring to it, even though my piece actually dwelt on mundane matters like the secrets of cooking fluffy rice and saving on LPG.

With the country in a deepening state of siege, I feel now is the right occasion to follow through with another multi-part column – this time a nasty medieval piece on war, especially on using swords and other bladed weapons designed for efficient human butchery. Sounds gory to you? Read on, dear friend.

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As I’ve said, I’m no film buff or professional critic who watches dozens of films in a month, speaks fondly of Truffaut and Kurosawa like they were college chums, and renders judgment on a film’s acting, direction and editing, with majestic finality.

I’m a plain street customer who knows what he likes: stories of historical conflict. And in my list, nothing beats real-life, well-researched, and gritty war stories, like A Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon. Or at least war stories that follow their own surreal historicity, like the popular Lord of the Rings and Star Wars trilogies.

But let’s set aside the light sabers wielded by Jedi knights long ago in a galaxy far away, and look instead at real swords that killed real people on modern Earth not so long ago and not so far away. One way would be through movies that portray ancient and medieval battles.

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This sort of film – tagged “sword-and-sandal movie” by Hollywood pundits and as “peplum” by Italian filmmakers – dates back to the early days of cinema, when spectacles such as the nine-reel Quo Vadis (1912) and the 12-reel Cabiria (1914) showed how wars were waged by ancient Rome.

The genre remained very much alive up to the 1960’s, with countless movies on historical or legendary warriors such as The Robe (1952), Ivanhoe (1952), The Silver Chalice (1954), The Vikings (1958), Spartacus (1960, re-released 1991), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), the Hercules series, and so on. A few famous figures were even made into movies five times or more, such as Ben-Hur and Cleopatra.

The genre was so successful, in fact, that I now actually hate viewing these Hollywood favorites because, every Lenten season when we were young, they monopolized the only interesting but repetitive TV and movie fare for the family.

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For bad or good, Hollywood practically dropped the genre from the mid-1960’s onwards.

The last notable sword films of that period were Alfred the Great (1969) and Cromwell (1970). Unlike their 1950’s and early 1960’s predecessors, these two films already carried the characteristic grittiness of the hippie protest era. (They were also among the first films that I watched on the big screen on my own, as a gangling and wide-eyed teenage loner.)

A decade later, Hollywood had fully replaced history with high fantasy, with so-called “sword-and-sorcery movies” becoming box-office hits, such as the Conan the Barbarian series (1981 onwards – I never watched any), Highlander series (1986 onwards – only mildly interesting), and Excalibur (1981, a surreal rendering of the King Arthur legend). The only notable historical sword movie of this period, King David (1985), flopped. The sword-and-sorcery genre itself tapered off by the 1990’s.

Why did the history-based genre die out in the late 1960’s, to be replaced by 1980’s fantasy-based sword-and-sorcery? I don’t know. I suspect the underlying causes had to do with the Vietnam War era and the post-Vietnam syndrome.

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Lately, however, history-based sword-and-sandal films are enjoying a resurgence. Some observers say the genre returned with Gladiators (2000), with Russell Crowe as Maximus – a Roman legion general who escapes a murderous imperial coup and makes a comeback as an avenging gladiator. (I watched the VCD three times until someone “borrowed” it without my permission. Grrr.)

The trend actually began several years earlier with Braveheart (1995) – a memorable, real-life story about Sir William Wallace (portrayed by Mel Gibson), Scotland’s most popular and revered national hero, a revolutionary mass leader who fought side by side with his troops on the frontlines.

The film ranks very high in my list, because it tells how, in the late 13^th century, the son of a minor clan notable led and built up a peasant-based guerrilla army to liberate Scotland from cruel British rule, despite being weighed down by double-dealing native feudal lords. (I watched the movie three times and devoured all the details, flinching only at the final execution scene when Wallace is hanged, drawn, and quartered before a big London crowd.)

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Next came two Joan of Arc films (both in 1999), about another medieval war of liberation, led by the maiden warrior of Orleans – a French peasant girl guided by a foreign ideology. One was the full-feature The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc, the other was the CBS mini-series Joan of Arc. Despite criticism that they were full of inaccuracies, I loved both films because of its historical heroine – not to mention falling head over heels with Milla Jovovich and LeeLee Sobieski.

After these films, and spurred by the success of Gladiators, came a Grecian double-treat that no sword-and-sandals aficionado could refuse: Troy (2004), a cinematic retelling of the timeless Homeric tale about the Trojan war and its superhuman heroes and gods, and Alexander (2004), a sweeping if somewhat exhausting account of how the Hellenic city-states grew into an empire through Alexandrian sword, fire, and intellect.

In these past few years came three other films with oddly similar twists about heroic swordsmen being sucked into civilizations about to fall: The Last Samurai (2003), set in the fading years of feudal Japan; King Arthur (2004), an attempt to historicize the Celtic legend, and set in the fading years of Roman Britain; and Kingdom of Heaven (2005), about the fall of Christian Jerusalem in the fading years of the Second Crusade.

You guessed right. I saw them all.

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At this point, Kabsat Kandu, who didn’t have the virtues of patience and subtlety but was able to follow me thus far, rattled off some surprisingly lucid questions:

First, what is the reason behind the recent revival of sword-and-sandal films? Is it of any social significance?

Second, how could you sit through all of these violent movies? Is it just some cult obsession, or is there perhaps some universal human appeal in watching scenes of bloody carnage, up close where steel blade meets sinewed flesh – if only theatrically through the eyes of the filmmaker?

And third, why are you telling your readers all these? Is it of any use in the current efforts to oust GMA – which is now the topic of perhaps 50% of all columnists throught the land?

“Oh, but remember,” I lectured Kabsat Kandu as he peered at the PC screen over my shoulder, “this is a multi-part article.” And so, dear readers, like my pesky friend here, you will have to visit this page again next week for some answers. #

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From: Northern Dispatch Weekly, 31 July 2005

Famous deaths from simple causes

In this season of tampered tapes and stolen votes, allow me a moment to wallow in irrelevance and to talk off-topic – about famous deaths from simple causes.

I’m not talking about legendary deaths due to dramatic but straightforward causes, like Jesus dying on the cross or John F. Kennedy killed by a sniper shot.

I’m talking about moneyed people dying incongruously of stupid causes, like common diseases that afflict mostly the poor. I’m talking about people like Reyster Langit, rising broadcast journalist and son of veteran broadcaster Rey Langit, dying of falciparum malaria in a California hospital.

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Falciparum or cerebral or blackwater malaria is the most prevalent type of malaria, accounting for about 50 percent of all cases worldwide, estimated at 250 million yearly, and is responsible for up to 95 percent of all malarial deaths estimated at 2 million yearly.

The very words “falciparum” and “blackwater” give me the creeps since they sound so ancient and mysterious and lethal, and yet the sickness is so common today in rural villages in forested or swampy areas of the country.

As a child, I remember my father telling stories of how, as a guerrilla journalist in Abra-Ilocos during World War II, he watched helplessly as comrades died of the fever, untreated due to lack of drugs. He himself would be stricken with the same illness towards the end of the war, his blood turning whitish and his urine turning ominously black due to massive loss of red blood cells – thus the name “blackwater malaria”. He was saved just in time by the arrival of US Army medics.

(“And that is why I will never join your rallies against so-called US imperialism,” he would later exclaim in our endless dinner-table debates during the First Quarter Storm. But that’s for another story.)

Years later, I would lose a close friend to the same dreaded killer, and experience myself the same feverish and delirious paroxysms, thankfully not of the blackwater variety.

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The terror is so stark and yet so familiar to many rural people. For some reason, however, killer malaria has not been decisively addressed by the government, nor regularly publicized in the national media if only to warn urbanites and tourists who frequently travel to the hinterlands whether on vacation or business. That is, until Reyster fell sick of falciparum and died a week after covering a malarial outbreak in the Palawan hinterlands.

Ironically, Reyster’s US doctors had to get information from San Lazaro Hospital in Manila – where a member of Reyster’s news team was also hospitalized some days earlier – before they could diagnose and begin treating his illness correctly. By then it was too late.

Did a young and promising journalist have to die first, very tragically and unnecessarily, before the government is prodded into decisive action against malaria?

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I might sound very cynical, but maybe that’s how things should work out around here.

After all, tuberculosis had been a scourge in the country for centuries (especially among poor people), but the government started a serious anti-TB program only after Pres. Manuel Quezon died from that very disease in a New York hospital.

By now, however, the government’s anti-TB program has become sick itself, as tubercular as its patients. Maybe it’s time for another president to die of TB, if only to revive public awareness and galvanize government action? I hope not! (Un-Christian this might sound, but if I were able to choose the manner of death of the current president, it should be from diarrhea. Of the mouth.)

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But I digress. Let’s get on with this business of celebrity deaths.

Senator Rene Cayetano’s liver was first ravaged by hepatitis-B, before he ultimately died of liver cancer. So now do we have a revitalized hepa-B prevention program, aside from the costly vaccines being pushed by DOH?

Actor Rico Yan died of bangungot, the scourge of young Asian working-class males. So have you heard of any post-Rico Yan initiative to research and prevent more bangungot deaths?

Actor Miko Sotto fell off a high-rise building. So now do we have better occupational safety measures to prevent more high-rise falls, which should benefit thousands of construction workers if not condo yuppies who are always seeking new highs in more ways than one?

Speaker Joe de Venecia’s daughter was trapped and killed in a tragic fire. So now do we have results from the legislator’s gallant vow, made that same night, to work for better fire prevention laws and fire-fighting technology? Do urban poor slum communities sleep better now, safe from firestorms that are proving much quicker, cheaper and deadlier than demolition squads?

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I don’t wish that it actually turns out that way, but would provincial bus travel be safer now, had DOTC Sec. Leandro Mendoza and his family been riding that Byron Bus on that fateful day when 30 lives were lost along Marcos Highway?

Would food service in public schools be safer now, had DepEd Sec. Butch Abad’s children been eating the same poisoned cassava cake that killed 28 children in that Bohol elementary school?

Would villages downstream from big mines such as along the Abra River have safer water to drink, had DENR Sec. Mike Defensor’s parents happen to live and farm there?

I could go on and on, but I hope the point has been made.

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My apologies to the readers of this column for not having posted a piece for the past several months. My Writer’s Muse and I had a bit of a quarrel about Her demands taking up too much of my time, and in a flurry of exchanges, I told Her to go away.

I was thinking in terms of a week or two while I finished some reports. Hayun, nagtampo, lumayas ng tatlong buwan. I’m still trying to woo Her back. Not an easy task, I assure you. #

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From: Northern Dispatch Weekly issue of 10 July 2005

Introducing "Pathless Travels"

Hello world. I'm Jun Verzola, a Filipino based in the Philippines. I have a website, www.iraia.net, but the tedium discourages me from updating that site often. So now I'm trying my hand at blogging. A bit like creating an e-group, and hoping that "if I build it, they will come." I also write a regular column, named "Pathless Travels", for Northern Dispatch, a regional weekly newspaper in Northern Luzon. (Actually, I was a former editor of the paper.)

I had wanted to name this blog "Iraia" to be consistent with my other website. (What "iraia" means, I'll explain later.) But the name was already taken. Next I thought of Pinoy Almanak. A good name, actually, and also reflected a project I had long wanted to pursue. But I backtracked, not wanting to raise expectations too much about this blog. So finally I settled with the name of my column, Pathless Travels.

This blog, hopefully, will contain not merely my column pieces, some of which also appear at the Nordis website, but the many posts I write for certain e-groups, including the topics I was hoping to pursue in the Iraia website.

Blogging is good for humankind.

A fascinating prehistory

My younger son is in Grade 3, and sometimes I'm called upon to help him do his homework or review for his periodic exams.

A month ago, as I was checking his homework, we fell into a heated argument.

He claimed that the people of the Cordillera were descended from the first wave of Malays that came over here, while the rest of Luzon lowland peoples (e.g. Kapampangan, Tagalog) and the Visayans were descended from a second wave of Malays. He proceeded to lecture to me how the Malays were preceded by Indonesians, who also came in two waves ­ Type A and Type B.

I tried to explain to him, in terms an 8-year old mind could grasp, that the wave migration theory of how our country was populated ­most elaborately developed by Dr. H. Otley Beyer ­ has been debunked by most scholars of Philippine prehistory for quite some time now. No, my son insisted, I was utterly wrong, and how dare I question his teacher and his textbook!

OK, I said, show me where this is taught in your book. He pulled out his Pilipinas: Bayan Mo, Bayan Ko (3), which was the school's chosen textbook for 3rd-grade "Sibika at Kultura." And, to my utter incredulity, there it was indeed ­ on pages 66-71. It even had a drawing of the first-wave Indonesians (tall, lean, with thin lips, aquiline noses and large eyes) side by side with the second-wave Indonesians (smaller stature but stocky build, with thick lips and flat noses).

It appears that many grade-school textbooks continue to perpetuate unfounded myths and obsolete theories about our country's prehistory, not to mention its history. The effect is not just a superficial understanding of how our peoples were constituted, but an overblown depiction of how minute or even imagined racial and ethnic distinctions among Filipinos today are supposedly rooted in migrations from other countries.

From 1916 to 1953, Beyer, then head of the UP Anthropology Dept., had developed an elaborate theory in which he tried to explain physical and cultural variations among the Filipinos by attributing them to a series of racially different migrant peoples who came in waves into
the country.

The first wave was supposedly the "Java men," followed by pygmies (such as the Negritos), then two Indonesian waves (Type A and Type B) and a minor Papuan wave, then separate Northern and Southern Malay waves, and finally the so-called "Jar Burial People," the Orang Dampuan of Sulu, and the Bornean settlers under the legendary Ten Datus led by Datu Puti.

As W.H. Scott explained in the introductory chapter of his Barangay: Sixteenth Century Philippine Culture and Society: "It is probably safe to say that no anthropologist accepts the Beyer Wave Migration Theory today."

Scott proceeded to explain that "most prehistorians today only postulate two movements of people into the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific" ­ the Australoids (generally characterized by very dark skin, such as the Negritos), followed by what anthropologists call the Southern Mongoloid or Austronesian peoples.

Let me quote extensively from Scott: "It is important to note that these migrating populations are not considered to have been physically homogeneous. This means that Austronesian settlers arrived in the Philippines with considerable variations in stature, pigmentation, and facial features, though it is not now possible to identify these differences."

"Settlement and intermarriage in small communities would cause such genetic traits, as well as those of any strangers marrying in from the outside, to be shared by an increasing portion of the population in each generation. Thus inhabitants of a whole valley might come to exhibit a kind of family resemblance, and even to be regarded by outsiders as a separate race."

Where did the Austronesian peoples come from? Let's try to delve a bit into prehistory. There is a very fascinating and scientifically probable theory described in Robert Blust's The Prehistory of the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples: A View from Language (a copy of which Patricia Afable graciously sent me).

The theory is supported by much linguistic, archeological, and other cultural evidence. According to the theory, prehistoric peoples who spoke a hypothetical ancient language (called "Austric" by linguists), from which all Austronesian, Austro-asiatic, and Sino-Tibetan languages are derived, originated in the region of western Yunnan bordering with Burma. In this rugged mountainous region where the three major Asian rivers (Salween, Mekong, and Yangzi) run parallel, a semi-sedentary pre-Neolithic culture that relied heavily on wild rice collection is postulated to have spread outwards to the lower-lying valleys starting around 9,000 years ago.

Some branches of this pre-Neolithic culture would have expanded to the Brahmaputra valley of eastern India and to the Salween and Mekong valleys of mainland Southeast Asia, where the Austro-Asiatic languages (Munda, Mon-Khmer) evolved. Another branch moved into China's middle Yangzi basin, where rice was domesticated in the marshy or seasonally flooded lakelands.

Around 8,000 years ago, the mid-Yangzi rice farming cultures divided into two branches. One branch (peoples speaking Proto-Tai-Kadai) moved south into western Guizhou. Another branch (peoples speaking Proto-Austronesian) moved east around Hangzhou Bay. From there, the proto-Austronesian peoples expanded to Fujian by about 7,000 years ago, and across the strait to Taiwan around 6,000 years ago.

From Taiwan, Austronesian-speaking peoples with distinctive Neolithic cultures sailed into northern Philippines perhaps 5,500 years ago (probably in rafts with sails, or perhaps even in canoes with outriggers). Their productive capacity at that point already included cultivation of rice and other grain, root crops, tree crops and sugarcane; domesticated dogs, pigs, chicken, and perhaps carabaos; hunting and fishing; metal-working; cloth-weaving; and sea-faring as well as warfare skills (including the practice of head-hunting).

From northern Philippines, it is theorized, such peoples and their cultures spread into other parts of the archipelago, and from there branched into the rest of Southeast Asian and Pacific archipelagos. Later, there would have been other migrations in opposite directions and cultural diffusion through trade, but the basic population stock would already have been established.

Going back to Scott, in his Prehispanic Source Materials, it is theorized that the descendants of these Austronesian-speaking peoples expanded throughout the Philippine archipelago during the succeeding millennia, absorbing or replacing earlier populations and languages.

"In the process," Scott said, their original language diversified into dozens of mutually unintelligible languages, and replaced all earlier ones." If this scenario is correct, Scott explained, all present Philippine languages [with a few exceptions] were produced within the archipelago, none of them was introduced by a separate migration, and all of them are more like each other than any of them is with languages outside the Philippines."

In short, as I tried to explain to my son, we Filipinos had already much in common among ourselves long before the Spanish and American colonizers came. We do not need to invent artificial "waves of migration" to explain variations and exceptions within a basically common racial, cultural, and linguistic Austronesian heritage.

Reading the arguments supporting this theory, I realized that we here in northern Luzon have a big responsibility to rediscover, cherish and perhaps relearn these precious legacies of Austronesian lifeways, cultures and languages, nearly lost in the hazy fog of past millennia and in the colonial destruction of past centuries.

So there. Next time your teacher gives a lecture or quiz on whether your ancestors belonged to "Indonesian A or B," or "Northern or Southern Malay," show her a clipping of this column. Or better yet, politely ask her to please read Scott and Blust. #

From NORTHERN DISPATCH WEEKLY, Nov. 29, 2002 (Vol. 14 No. 9)