In our attempts to decolonize the Philippines at the heart of the Southeast Asian region, a move that continuously being haunted by the imperious influence of the Western world, I propose a keyword I call “vulgos,” drawn from the archive of a 19th-century polymath folklorist and labor union leader from the Philippines, but also an early thinker of Southeast Asia, Isabelo De Los Reyes. I propose “vulgos” as a keyword that empowers us to wield a decolonial approach to the study of the coloniality Philippines, and this entails an attempt to critique what stands as a nation, especially that “vuglos” gets to be translated by contemporary scholars as “people.” The “vulgos” enables us, despite how it might sound pejoratively, to vulgarize the Western critical theory by ensuring an index, such as the “vuglos,” as a collective that recognizes the lack of a recognizable coherent identity and social formation, and subsequently, it propels us to develop a predicate from such subject, which acknowledges the lack, the autochthone, and the subalternity as a necessary beginning in any study of the decolonial process of the Philippines, as well as the broad Southeast Asia. With this frame, I recognize the indexical function as well of the “vulgos” for us to appreciate the attempt of De Los Reyes to archive the 19th century cosmology, which he felt was disappearing in the face of expanding colonial modernity, a historical moment necessary for us to expand the tendency of nationalism to eclipse the fugitive nature of the people as the colonial modernity ushers in the birth of a modern nation-state. As a result, by deconstructing what naturally gets to be elided in the chronological narrative of the shift of the pre-colonial to the colonial Philippines, the vulgos shows the cosmology that brings together congeries of ghosts, witches, shamans, faith-healers, magic, occult, and at large, folklore as an interim where the “nation” morphed into an epistemological weapon to flatten the breadth of transnational connection of the Philippines with Southeast Asia, but also a pluriverse in which the cognitive imagination is beyond the anthropocentrism of the Western epistemology. However, without recognizing the presumption of a “vulgos,” it would be difficult to proceed since the colonial modernity of nation-state will perpetually persist with its monolithic idea of a people, but also the human, anthropocentrism ad infinitum. From this point, I also share the vulgar archive of De Los Reyes, which were published at the turn of the 20th century, spanning from anthropological monograph, folklore essays, working class periodical, and even literature, which has remained in the original Spanish, hiding in the lack of national interest to study our colonial language.
Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)
Panel 3: Folk and Creole Epistemologies
3:30-5:30pm HK/SG time / 8:30-10:30am BST / 9:30-11:30am CEST / 3:30-5:30am EDT / 12:30-2:30am PDT