MANILA, Philippines - For renowned Filipino anthropologist Dr. Felipe Landa Jocano, a real look at our Philippine ancestry requires going back to way before the Philippines was supposedly discovered by its colonizers.
To him, this approach in education will teach Filipino students that there are things in our culture that had long been there even before the colonizers set foot on our islands.
In a lecture to high school students held last week in Quezon City, Dr. Jocano said students must approach Philippine history “going back (way before colonization) and not just start with colonization.”
Dr. Jocano, a Ten Outstanding Young Men awardee in 1965, is the first to hold a PhD in Anthopology in the Philippines.
Dr. Jocano hinted that Philippine history has been focused on the negative aspect of our culture that “when we speak of culture, we go to Juan Tamad.”
“Education must be geared towards nation-building,” he stressed.
During the lecture titled “Yaman ng Lahi” and organized by C. Futures Inc., historyko.org and Teachers@Work, Dr. Jocano was accompanied by his son and namesake, Professor Felipe Jocano Jr. of the University of the Philippines.
Dr. Jocano cited the Filipino epics, some of which he had studied and translated himself.
One of those was “sung to me by a mountain elder” for two to three weeks, he said. It took the woman two to three weeks to finish singing the epic, which according to Dr. Jocano was consistent and long.
“For a 65-year-old woman to memorize it is simply amazing,” he said, noting that the epic has some 28,000 lines.
According to Dr. Jocano, these epics, which form part of the Filipinos’ oral tradition, usually talk about courtship and love, very much different from the European epics that depict stories about wars and battles.
“We always look at Iliad and Odyssey (that) we have escaped looking at our backyard for possible literature,” he said.
Dr. Jocano also cited that long before the country was colonized and modern technology supposedly came to the Philippines, the locals already had their way of embalming the dead and even their own form of government.
Professor Jocano Jr. said that while a lot has been said about the supposed negative trait among Filipinos, these characteristics have a rather positive side to them.
The example he cited was the “bahala na” concept, which to outsiders might appear as not recognizing responsibility and total resignation.
But Professor Jocano Jr. said “there’s something wrong with this definition.” He noted that the concept was actually the assumption of responsibility for whatever the outcome of something may be.
According to Prof. Jocano Jr., we should change the way we view our identity as a nation and our value system towards our race.
“We should not apologize for being Filipinos,” he said.