Week 3 Reading Materials
Week 3 Reading Materials
Week 3 Reading Materials
Learning Outcomes:
Pre-Colonial Period
Further proof that the gold bits were indeed the coins
used by early Filipinos surfaced when the largest piloncito
was found to weigh 2.65 grams, which is equivalent to one
‘mas,’ the standard weight of gold that was used across
Southeast Asia.
goods”.
Post-Colonial Philippines
In the last two decades of Spanish rule in the
Philippines, the colonizers created a countrywide public
sphere dominated by political, administrative, and religious
institutions. They created a "modem", world market-oriented
economy, in conjunction with the economic activities of the
colonial state (Mulder 2000:180). This "modem" creation
should also be viewed against the background of the Spanish
galleon trade between Manila and Acapulco that lasted for
two and a half centuries, from 1565 to 1815, the period in
European history that falls approximately between the naval
battle of Lepanto and the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at
Waterloo (Legarda 1999:32). Nevertheless, the Philippines
remained an agricultural economy (Mulder 2000:181.
During the American colonial era that effectively was
in place in 1901, the country came to see "modernity" from
the American perspective. The global perspectives this
opened are still with the Filipinos of today. An active
civil society arose in the Philippines, as a result of
economic development and [American] education, well before
it emerged in Indonesia and Thailand (Mulder 2000: 190-1).
However complex and contentious the processes that
animate the culture of the public world in the Philippines,
the overall image it evokes is that of a market, a place to
bargain and to earn a living that is kept at a safe distance
from private concerns (Mulder 2000:190). Elite and masses
live in two separated worlds, like two nations in one state.
In the space between these two, are the civil servants,
small businesspeople, and professionals who comprise the
middle class. In the urban space, the middle class operates
in, everyone minds his own business, pursues her own
interests. Here, society is a market. In the market, only
money counts (Mulder 2000:186-7).
Today's Filipinos come from the various lines of
peoples who inhabited the islands of the archipelago, the
very same peoples who have since 1571 been adapting,
negotiating, resisting or surrendering to the coercion of
two European colonizers, and one Asian imperialist. Again,
by way of Huntington (2001: 109), it seems appropriate here
to recall Dussel who has come to the conclusion that the
"realization of modernity lies a process that will transcend
modernity as such, a trans-modernity, in which both
modernity and its negated alterity or the victims, co-
realize themselves in a process of mutual creative
fertilization."
Per Bronner (1994:301), "Habermas following Talcott Parsons
and Niklas Luhmann, asserts that modernization involves the
generation of systems with increasingly complicated sub-systems
whose reproduction depends upon their capacity to secure
universalistic processes of adaptation against the 'lifeworld'.
If the lifeworld stands distinct from the instrumental logic of
state and economic systems, however, it is not divorced from all
integration mechanisms" Bronner (1994:301) continues. By
translating "latently available structures of rationality" into
social practice, new social movements supplanted the proletarian
"macro-subject" of history. Thus, these new social movements
receive emancipatory definition in terms of their ability to
assail the given systems logic through their attempts to redeem
the
solidarity and subjectivity anthropologically embedded in the
lifeworld (Bonner 1984:301).