Filipino American Experiences:
War, Empire, Migration, and Cultural Imaginaries
Asian American Studies 151K / Social Science 178
Professor Christine Balance || em: cbalance@uci.edu
Wednesday, October 28, 15
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1. What can the historical event of the 1904 World’s
Fair tell us about the relationship between citizenship
& performance? between science/technology and
modernity?
2. What does the film Bontoc Eulogy aim to teach us
specifically about the 1904 World’s Fair and more
broadly about history and memory?
Wednesday, October 28, 15
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What was the 1904 World’s Fair?
(aka “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition”) opened
April 30 and closed December 1st.
•1,200 acre site consisting of exhibits staged by
62 foreign nations, the U.S. government, and 43
(of the then 45) U.S. states
•supposedly various “American fare”/foods were
invented (or, at least, popularized) at the Fair: ice
cream cone, hamburgers, hot dogs
•after the Spanish-American War (1898), U.S.
acquired various territories (Puerto Rico, Guam,
Philippines) and decided to put on display their
various inhabitants (alongside Apache—all of
whom were considered “primitive”)
•other notables put on display—Geronimo and
Ota Benga
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William McGee (Fair co-organizer) and Apache tribe members
(including Geronimo)
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Fair organizers hoped the Fair would be
•!educational forum: William McGee, Albert Jenks and others
who were part of the World’s Fair planning committee—
proponents of scientific racism and some, like Dean Worcester,
were part of new U.S. bureaucratic administration in the
Philippines
•!scientific belief in eugenics (Social Darwinism): the study of or
belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human
species or a human population, based upon “developmental”
narrative of race.
•!showed not only primitive countries but also the latest of
Western inventions (note: competing discourses—Western
modernity/technology vs. Eastern/Other primitive/
backwardness)
•!displayed the physical and social fitness of certain groups to be
“ideal citizens”
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Philippine Reservation:
• 47 acres with over 100 buildings, the
Philippine Reservation consisted of various
villages where 1102 Filipinos were exhibited/
made to perform daily their rituals of birth,
death, marriage, war/fighting. The reservation
villages were comprised of ethnically & diverse
tribes/classes— Negritos, Igorots, Bontoc,
Kalinga, Moros, Visayans, Philippine
Constabulary Band, and Philippine Scouts.
• Most famous Filipinos among fairgoers—
Igorots. Why? –less clothed, dark skinned,
most likely to adapt to American ways (singing
of songs, wearing clothes, etc.)
• How were these Filipinos described? – “they
are like children,” “noble savages,” “primitive,”
“little brown men,” “savage gentlemen”
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Fig. 57. Imperial schooling on the Philippine Reservation. From
National Archives.
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politics of exhibiting: the role of exhibitions/museums
in the production of social knowledge for “museum
collections do not simply ‘happen’: artifacts have to
be made to be collected, and collected to be
exhibited. They are historical, social, and political
events.
Anthropology/ethnology: a human science that
codified knowledge in a manner so it could be called
upon as ‘a moral as well as a scientific justification
for the often bloody process of imperial expansion.
It “does not simply reflect ‘real’ distinctions between
peoples, but creates them.” (Lidchi, 186 in
Representations)
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Schurman Commission— also known as the First
Philippine Commission, Philippine legislature under
the sovereign control of the United States that was
established by President McKinley in 1899. He
appointed Dr. Jacob Schurman and a five-man team
to make recommendations on the state of the
Philippine Islands – Schurman noted that, though the
Filipinos desired independence, they were not quite
ready for it.
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Dean Conant Worcester
From 1899-1901, American zoologist and
collector Dean Conant Worcester served
on the Schurman Commission, an
investigating body to report on the
conditions in and recommend further U.S.
actions in the Philippine Islands. Nestled
in the pages of Worcester's two-volume
scientific and exploratory report, The
Philippines, Past and Present, a portrait
entitled "Entertaining the Kalingas"
illustrates the colonial encounter between
the island "savages" and Western
modernity mediated through the
technology of the phonograph.
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Filipinos, phonographs,
and (discourses of)
primitivism
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Modern technology and Aesthetics of
CAMERA –
form of display and surveillance,
reproducibility and mass circulation;
Genre and artistic form of
PHOTOGRAPHY—
portraying the ‘real’; objective/
authoritative;
equivalence between ‘camera vision’
and ‘human vision”;
certificate of presence and historical
document;
utilized by anthropologists & police
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colonial narrative/ideology—a set of ideas that might find its genesis
and its most powerful articulation in colonial state policy but is mainly a
floating, diffuse mass of beliefs, materially constituted through
representations. This colonial narrative was morally steeped in U.S.
notions of Manifest Destiny and included the intent to civilize. It required
the colonized to be inferior to the colonizer, socially engineered to be like
the colonizer, and currently unfit for self-government.
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“Igorots Dancing” (by Gerhard Sisters, 1904)
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Impact of 1904 World’s
Fair:
created a discourse
about Filipinos’
relationship to
modernity
an event that set up the
paradox of
hypervisibility/invisibility
for Filipinos in the U.S.
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Impetus for film Bontoc Eulogy
“I was also fascinated by how certain bodies of
knowledge and their representational strategies
were codified into structures and surfaces that
had their own intrinsic valences and ways of
reception. For example, anthropology and,
specifically, ethnographic film had historically
contained epistemological assumptions about the
Other.” (Blumentritt, 116)
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Bontoc Eulogy:
audience for film: bi-modal
film’s aesthetics:
a) anti-illusionistic; layers of film’s production play off
each other
b) oscillation between fictionality and authenticity;
imaginative and archival
c) calls attention to ethnographic gaze
d) calls attention to the audience’s relationship to
Narrator and narratives
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“I believe that history is really an art of memory. The
gaps and ellipses are just as important as the
materials we have in our hands. If they are missing
for certain reasons, whether by accident or force of
omission, perhaps these irregularities force us to
reflect on the nature and origins of our own
situation.” (Fuentes in Blumentritt, 120)
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Corporeal colonization:
“the process through which the
American colonial project was
enacted on its Filipino subjects,
more specifically on the Filipino
body.” (Burns, 31) In Catherine
Ceniza Choy’s study, corporeal
colonization is most readily cited in
the example of the 1904 World’s
Fair’s displays of Filipino savagery
and their coerced performances.
According to Burns, “(I)n the context
of the taxi dance halls, corporeal
colonization must necessarily be
expanded to include the workings of
American popular dance and music,
fashion, and social mores as part of
ideological state apparatus that
extend U.S. cultural
hegemony.” (Burns, 32)
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