SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This is a decolonial reading of a little-known cultural community in Bohol vis-a-vis their highly functional collective responses to the overdeterminations of Philippine colonization. The study sets out to accomplish three things. Beginning with the archiving of Eskayan narratives, treastises, songs, glyphs· and flags, and the creation of an epistemic space for their inclusion as valid objects of cultural investigation, it proceeds to make a reading of the Eskayan strategies for cultural construction. The reading will show that the Eskayan cultural text is a highly volatile "conjectural node" in its capacity to subvert the balance of asymetrical power through a mobilization of meaning. This symbolic subversion of power is accomplished through three cultural modes: the letra (a claim of a "retrieved'' preHispanic syllabary with its attendant assertions of linguistic sufficiency/superiority over Western/Roman alphabets of the Castilian language); the lingganay (a claim of a pre-hispanic type of Christianity); and the bandera (a claim of political centrality both in the historic past and the utopia future). These three arenas of cultural meaning are posited as the sources of those which constitute the re-readings/re-writings of linguistic, religious and historical hegemonies in the Eskayan agenda of deconstructing dominant social imaginaries and the constructing/re-constructing of their own collective constructivity.