This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 50, January 29-February 4, 2006
CULTURE
Images from the Margins
Unlike colonial-age ethnographic studies and shots for foreign tourist
consumption, Raymond Panaligan's images are not voyeuristic tokens of the
'savage natives', taken as samples of the exotic and uncivilized under the lying
assumption of cultural and material inferiority. Instead, Panaligan's
photographs are intimate and straightforward depictions of the Mangyans from
their point of view.
By Lisa C. Ito
Raymond Panaligan's images
are postcards from the peripheries of the Philippines: intimate snapshots of
daily scenes from Mangyan communities in southern Mindoro. Panaligan presents
portraits of a people dispossessed by colonial and contemporary incursions into
their ancestral lands, disenfranchised in their own communal territories, and
left behind in an archipelago surrounded by crisis. The Mangyan documentation
is an ongoing project of his. Using photography as a means to document their
presence, Panaligan has chronicled the day to day lives of Mangyans through the
years since 1993, during his excursions to their communities in southern Mindoro.
He has documented most closely the lines of Hanunoo Mangyans, one of the seven
existing tribes populating the peripheries of Mansalay and Bulalacao at the
southeastern fringes of Mindoro Island. Panaligan has journeyed back and forth
from Manila to Mindoro since then, capturing their images through community and
individual immersions, fact-finding operations and peace missions. Panaligan's documentation
is relevant because of its historical value and from its political import. While
documentary evidence related to the Mangyan tribes can be accessed through
archives and libraries, existing visual evidence of Mangyan communities is
sparse and rare. Panaligan engages in a cultural practice that charts and
recreates their existence in collective and public memory, a kind of assurance
against transience and forgetting. The conscious political
import of Panaligan's choice to present images from the margins is evident: as a
recipient of the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship for Photography in 1999,
Panaligan could have chosen to continue producing photographs of New York's grim
realities. Or shots from his stints as a Manila-based freelance photojournalist.
Yet the Mangyan photo-documentation project has remained a sustained and
continuous endeavor for more than a decade, something that Panaligan committed
himself to on a long-term basis. The difference of
Panaligan's images from that of existing documentation of different Mangyan
tribes lies in their affinities with their subjects. Unlike colonial-age
ethnographic studies and shots for foreign tourist consumption, the images are
not voyeuristic tokens of the 'savage natives': taken as samples of the exotic
and uncivilized under the lying assumption of cultural and material inferiority.
Instead, Panaligan's
photographs are intimate and straightforward depictions of the Mangyans from
their point of view. This can be inferred from the way the images are taken by
the photographer: instead of staged frontal or profile poses of the Mangyans
intended to document their details of clothing or physique, Panaligan
unobtrusively captures spontaneous scenes and details from their day to day
lives, setting his lens whenever and wherever his subjects feel comfortable in.
The subjects behave naturally even as the lens captures their images, perhaps
indicating a degree of familiarity or ease with the photographer's presence.
This is a significant clue that points to the photographer's affinity for the
Mangyan way of life and struggle, considering the persistence of pre-modern
superstitions that believe cameras 'capture' a part of a person's soul and the
grim paranoia over military surveillance through technological equipment, such
as cameras and videos. The photographs attest to
how the Hanunoo Mangyans have adhered to their traditions, kept alive in the
handicrafts and personal ornaments they produce by hand. Panaligan's images of
Mangyan mothers and their children document the various communal crafts, such as
basketry, which they engage in during their spare time between
kaingin
farming,child-rearing, and other chores. The photograph of a smiling Mangyan
baby, for instance, is laden with the beaded bracelets, basketry,and textiles
that Mangyan women have also started to produce as for commercial, as well as
personal, consumption over the years. Yet, the images also
document surface manifestations of how Mangyans have been systematically
isolated from the mainland economy, politics, and culture. A photograph of three
tribes people wandering through a commercial area with a few handwoven wares
remind the viewer of their struggle to survive in an economy and society that
refuses to integrate their specific needs into the whole. This dislocation and
juxtaposition of differing cultural and material differences is seen in a
photograph of a young Mangyan girl at a hand loom, weaving their traditional
blue and white textile while wearing a t-shirt with the acronym 'USA' (donated
as a relief good or bought with precious cash, perhaps). Images of Mangyan children
populate Panaligan's works, perhaps as a metaphor for the emergence of a new
generation of dispossessed national minorities who grow up in the ways of their
ancestors but who are also systematically deprived of their basic rights and
needs up to the present. The image of a lone Mangyan
child, crunched up in hunger before three empty
calderos,
sums up the stark reminders of the contrasting
reality in Philippine society: in spite of all the state's proclamations of
economic development and 'progress', fundamental economic and social problems
continue to ravage national minorities such as the Mangyan tribes. The
photographs, simple depictions of deprivation they may seem to be on the
surface, attest to the painful persistence of problems that are so basic:
hunger, landlessness, terror wrought by militarization and counter-insurgency
campaigns, displacement by foreign multinational incursions into potential
mining sites, lack of access to basic social services such as health care and
education. The photographs document
the serenity and composure with which the Mangyans face their trials, but much
more lies beneath the black and white images. These silently harbor the Mangyans
testimonies of their perennial problems with the lack of
irrigation, and damaging floods when the river overflows during the rainy
season. The images of Mangyan families eating together hide the reality that
people in this part of the archipelago are forced to eat only once or twice a
day. They subsist mainly on bananas and eat rice only once or twice a week.
While their harvest of mangoes and bananas is abundant, the literal fruits of
their labor remain underpriced. One sack containing around 300 mangoes can be
easily haggled local traders for only thirty to forty pesos, for instance.
The images of Mangyan
children foraging in foliage underscore the fact that they are not in school.
The rare and far-flung schoolhouses in Mindoro's interior areas (where most
Mangyans live) stop at the grade school level due to the chronic lack of
teachers. Even then many children are forced to stop their studies because they
have to find food or work for their families. Even medical and relief missions
are rare, as compared to the seemingly non-existent government health facilities
scattered in a few towns. Tuberculosis, long eradicated in developed countries,
still remains a scourge in these parts. There is little electricity and potable
water sources to speak of. What the images do not
depict are more sinister. These are rarely documented through photographs, but
human rights violations by the military are common occurrences, especially even
since Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan was assigned to head the counter-insurgency
campaign in the Southern Tagalog region, with special and bloodthirsty focus on
Mindoro. Undocumented by photographs are the murders and tortures of Mangyans
suspected to be New Peoples' Army (NPA) members or supporters. Soldiers actively
recruited for CAFGUs among Mangyans, promising a few thousand pesos per month
and a free coffin in return for their roles in the counter-insurgency campaigns.
Yet, at the same time, the
photographs stand as a testament to their struggle against neocolonial and
military exploitation and adherence to the values of their ancestors. Their
traditional and communal values of cooperation and togetherness are seen in the
photographs of Mangyan families having their humble meals together in their
cramped and handmade huts. At a time when many other Filipino families are
forced and encouraged by the state's labor export policies to live apart in
order to survive and stay together, these images remind us that the Mangyans,
among the most systematically deprived in this nation of the exploited, have no
little choice but to find strength in unity and struggle. In the end, it is the
photograph of a Mangyan child wielding a bolo and struggling to get through
through the thick foliage that provides the compelling metaphor for a peoples'
will to survive, stay true to their ancestors, and fight amidst the hardships
they face. Panaligan's photographs provide and revive our memories of the
disenfranchised in our land, and in doing so, raise awareness of their
conditions and struggle to survive.
Bulatlat © 2006 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.
The Mangyan
struggle against dispossession
in the documentary-photography of Raymond Panaligan
Bulatlat