Ontological lack and the need for fantasy

Ontological security is primarily about the security not of the body per se, but of the Self. To be ontologically secure is to achieve a sense of safety grounded in the self, which, in turn, requires confidence in the consistency and continuity of one’s identity. Based on the more traditional Giddensian understanding, ontological security is primarily a psychological accomplishment shaped by our relationships with others and the routines that structure and sustain those relationships. Our ability to feel secure in our sense of self and in relation to others, Giddens theorizes, begins during infancy.Footnote ¹² It develops, to varying degrees, through the infant’s capacity to form a basic trust in what he calls the ‘existential anchorings’ of reality, both emotionally and cognitively. Our emotional and cognitive sense of reality, he suggests, is grounded in our early experiences that build our confidence in the reliability of other people. As we grow older, the routines we learned and mastered throughout our infancy and early childhood become fundamental to our emotional acceptance of the ‘reality’ of the external world, which, in turn, makes stable human existence possible by shaping our self-identity through the recognition of what is ‘not us’ or ‘not me’. As Cash explains, Giddensian ontological security relies heavily on a process of establishing boundaries between the self and the external world akin to how a cocoon protects the insect inside it from what lies outside.Footnote ¹³ This boundary-building continues throughout our lives, supported by established routines that help us preserve and reinforce our sense of security. Over time, the basic trust we developed during the early years of our lives becomes embedded in our everyday practices by which we sustain our identities.

This way of securitizing subjectivity, however, as Paterson and Rosher note, creates the notion that change is something to avoid as it generates ontological anxiety by introducing uncertainty.Footnote ¹⁴ In response, more recent scholarship has sought to challenge this conservative bias by highlighting a reflexive form of ontological security-seeking that can accommodate or even deliberately pursue change. For Browning and Joenniemi, for example, this shift is vital, since simply continuing to exist is not sufficient.Footnote ¹⁵ Put differently, humans generally seek not just survival, but a sense that their ongoing existence is meaningful and fulfilling. From here, the Lacan-inspired psychoanalytic turn in OSS has emerged, resulting in the expansion and reframing of ontological security as the security not necessarily of being (Giddensian OSS) but of becoming (Lacanian OSS). And within this Lacanian process of becoming (rather than being) ontologically secure, fantasy occupies a central place by serving as the conduit through which individuals attempt to cope with their inherent sense of incompleteness. Specifically, by giving us a sense of ‘place’ in the world in the form of an identity that feels coherent, stable, and complete, fantasy helps stabilize both our identity and perceptions of reality, shielding us from anxiety rooted in our own existential sense of lack.Footnote ¹⁶ For these reasons, fantasy cannot simply be dismissed as false consciousness that obscures truth and reality; rather, it is a vehicle for our quest towards an unattainable ideal: ontological security.Footnote ¹⁷

Relying on this theoretical scaffolding, I begin with the Lacanian premise that the subject is inherently incomplete, cast into a world not of its own making and therefore defined by a persistent lack it continually attempts to overcome in the pursuit of ontological security. In Epstein’s account, subjects are integrally divided between desire and language.Footnote ¹⁸ Although these subjects possess innate desires, their instantaneous transportation into the symbolic social order requires them to articulate themselves into being through a foreign language that cannot fully capture those desires.Footnote ¹⁹ Consequently, these primary desires become unattainable since they cannot be properly expressed. The transition from the domain of desire to that of discourse or the symbolic – what Epstein refers to as the ‘mediation of desire’ – is what makes individual identity possible in the first place.Footnote ²⁰ Yet, this very shift concurrently entails a loss, thereby producing a fundamental lack that is at the very heart of our identity. It is precisely this loss and the sense of alienation it creates that prevent the self from ever becoming fully unified and complete. To address this constitutive lack, the concept of fantasy becomes instrumental by showing how individuals collectively engage in forms of self-myth-making to fill the void and create an illusion of completeness and ontological security, helping us understand why and how subjects become attached to particular identities in the first place.Footnote ²¹ Owing to their power to channel the subjects’ sense of ontological absence towards an imagined object or ideal that appears to promise fulfilment, the pursuit of fantasies becomes particularly essential for sustaining subjectivity when we accept the Lacanian view that the subject is inevitably structured by lack.

Building on these propositions, the pantayong pananaw, I argue, is a fantasy that guides the Filipinos’ desire for, and quest to establish coherent, unified, and indivisible identity, homeland, and nation-state. By interweaving the narrative, practical, and affective dimensions of subjectivity, the pantayong pananaw fantasy operates as a discursive realm where fantasy and ontological security converge to (re)construct, (re)shape, and (re)fortify the subject’s Filipinoness within the symbolic social order. In other words, it is a fantasized discursive articulation and embodiment of an idealized self upon which their ontological security can ultimately be anchored. Underpinned and constituted by the interplay between language and affect, the pantayong pananaw fantasy is a metanarrative that channels the desire for wholeness and completeness into a scenario – a ‘real-world’ social order – offering the promise of ontological security. A vital task in this fantasy-making is the (re)discovery and (re)centring of signifiers that have, to some degree, been internalized and woven into the subjects’ (auto)biographical narratives of self-identity, thereby generating a strong affective pull.Footnote ²² Within this fantasy, narratives are sense-making devices enabling ideas of a stable self to be projected, and even safeguarded, across time and space by defining not only the self and who is included, but also the other and who is omitted.Footnote ²³ As such, they are central to both individual and collective memory, linking past experiences with present understandings and future expectations. The dynamic relationship between (auto)biographical narratives and the memories that are conjured through this fantasy also supports the construction of routinized behaviour as a means of reducing anxiety by supplying subjects with reassuring narratives of the past not only to stabilize the present, but also to guide their actions moving forward.

The pantayong pananaw as a master fantasy

For Zeus Salazar, the pantayong pananaw movement’s intellectual leader, the concept represents a synthesis of an indigenous understanding of history with the established methodologies of Western historiography.Footnote ²⁴ This cultural approach to historical analysis has been at the core of pantayong pananaw scholarship since it first emerged at the Department of History of the University of the Philippines in the late 1960s. In pursuing this agenda, the movement has focused on producing a form of historiography that it deems to be more appropriate and responsive to the country’s needs amidst the highly contested and insecure ground of knowledge creation in postcolonial Philippines. Guillermo, one of the movement’s main adherents, unpacks the etymology and meaning of the term, pantayong pananaw.Footnote ²⁵ The word pantayo could roughly be interpreted to mean ‘from-us-for-us’, whereas the term’s other half, pananaw, means ‘perspective’. Combined, pantayong pananaw translates to ‘from-us-for-us’ perspective, whereas its conceptual contradictory – the pang-kami – means ‘from-us-for-you’. To quote Guillermo, ‘while pantayo refers to a self-subsistent dialogical circle consisting of active (speaking) subjects, pang-kami denotes a situation in which the speakers present themselves as an “other-directed” collective object under the gaze (and therefore the spell) of an Other’.Footnote ²⁶ So, while in the pantayo perspective, the conversation takes place within a closed group (i.e. among members of a shared community), the pang-kami perspective involves speaking to those outside one’s own group. Closely tied to this question of audience is the issue of who historical knowledge is for and why it is produced. Under pantayong pananaw, such knowledge, according to Reyes, is meant for the group’s members themselves to help them better understand their collective identity, whereas in the pang-kami paradigm, historical knowledge is a means for one group to present itself to another, often to assert equality or superiority.Footnote ²⁷

The range of ways in which the term has been interpreted and deployed by other Filipino scholars working within and outside of the historical discipline underscores the movement’s evolving and heterogeneous intellectual constitution and application. Guillermo has outlined three broad categories depicting how the pantayong pananaw is used in theory and practice.Footnote ²⁸ First, the term functions as a descriptive context referring to specific social collectives possessing well-integrated and stable linguistic-cultural communication structures generated internally that help produce a sense of unified purpose and existence. Second, the term is used to refer to affiliated pantayong pananaw scholars whose works are characterized by a distinct style of anti-colonial thought and discourse challenging Western narratives of influence and discovery that depict Philippine history as a delayed recurrence of Western history or as a correction of misconceptions about the Filipinos. Third, the term also serves as a rather shallow signifier of being a member and a part of the pantayong pananaw’s discursive community through the complete or partial adoption of its specialized vernacular that weaves and connects these texts intertextually.

Beyond the general categorizations outlined above, pantayong pananaw possesses several vital properties that can make it a potential decolonial intellectual and political approach to the ontological insecurities that continue to characterize and destabilize everyday ethnoreligious relations in postcolonial Philippines. Southeast Asianist and pantayong pananaw expert, Curaming, has identified six of these based on the seminal works of leading Filipino intellectuals linked to the movement.Footnote ²⁹ First, the movement boasts an unapologetically nationalist and anti-colonial thrust as a pathway for securing a robust, cohesive, and confident Filipino nation. Accordingly, its traditional followers have resisted colonial influences such as the adoption of foreign languages and Western mindsets, which, they argue, result in a colonial inferiority complex that undermines the Filipinos’ capacity to unite and pursue self-determination. Second, the movement’s ‘inside looking in’ orientation means that pantayong pananaw discourse is primarily among members of the same in-group (i.e. Filipinos speaking to Filipinos) as opposed to between the in-group and all other out-groups. Consequently, the knowledge produced by the movement is dedicated to the members of that in-group and is intended to help them understand themselves better as a group, as opposed to enabling that in-group to present itself to another as at least their equal.

Third, by embracing cultural relativism as an ethos, the movement believes that every group has its unique worldview and way of life that is shaped by the conditions and situations unique to their environment. As such, pantayong pananaw denounces the comparative criteria set and used by others to judge between and among groups, maintaining that each group deserves to be understood on its own terms. Fourth, the movement’s proponents see the exclusivity afforded by their internalist and nation-focused orientation as a necessary strategy for protecting the establishment and stability of the core in-group. Once established and stabilized, the movement can then proceed and expand to encompass the larger nation, region, and ultimately the kabihasnan, which is essentially the anti-colonial response by the pantayong pananaw intellectuals to the universalist or totalizing aspirations of the Eurocentric concept of civilization. As such, and fifth, the movement takes cultural holism as an overarching goal by attempting to dismantle and overcome the supposed ‘great cultural divide’ between the colonized and Westernized, on the one hand, and the colonized but non-Westernized Filipinos, on the other. Salazar views this artificial divide as one of the lasting and most devastating legacies of colonization.Footnote ³⁰

Taken together, these specific and original constitutive properties can potentially make pantayong pananaw a viable decolonial master fantasy for the ontologically insecure Filipinos in search of a unified, coherent, and stable identity and homeland amidst the lingering feelings of lack and anxiety rooted in colonialism. However, when applied in practical terms, these anti-colonial properties of the movement produce some corresponding ‘side effects’ in the form of particularistic tendencies that put into question the viability and ethics of pantayong pananaw as a decolonial master fantasy.

CuramingFootnote ³¹ and GuillermoFootnote ³² have reflected on the gravity and impact of these issues on the movement’s professed mission and arrived at quite distinct estimations. On top of the list is the movement’s nativist tendency as manifested in Salazar’s notion of a real and existing great cultural divide between the ‘non-foreign influenced’ natives that must be advocated for and the ‘foreign-influenced’ entities that need to be resisted.Footnote ³³ Salazar believes that despite centuries of Spanish colonization, the number of Filipinos (i.e. mainly the educated and the elites) whose psychological constitution was permanently altered and, as a result, had been cut off from their native cultural anchor was small.Footnote ³⁴ Such assumptions, Curaming contends, were informed by Salazar’s conviction that there is one true indigenous Filipino identity and culture waiting to be rediscovered and recovered by the ‘unaffected’ majority.Footnote ³⁵ Guillermo, however, argues that this alleged form of nativism is partly due to the misreading of Salazar’s more nuanced philosophical stance, which needs to be fleshed out further instead of reducing it to blatant nativism.Footnote ³⁶ While admitting that its adherents differ in their positions concerning the appropriation of actual or perceived foreign concepts and theories, Guillermo maintains that the movement is resolutely not about linguistic or theoretical nativism.

Relatedly, the movement, Curaming notes, has stood accused of essentialism due to the rigid prescription of its staunchest supporters to adopt Tagalog-based Filipino as the exclusive discursive lingua franca, which they believe to be the only linguistic vessel capable of genuinely unifying the Filipino people and capturing the real essence of their shared lived experiences.Footnote ³⁷ The use of foreign languages, particularly English, is seen as reinforcing and perpetuating the colonial great cultural divide between the elite and ordinary Filipinos and, therefore, must be supplanted by making the Tagalog-based Filipino the official state language and the legitimate medium of instruction across the archipelago.Footnote ³⁸ A further offshoot of these nativist and essentialist charges is the logic of binarism, which other Filipino scholars such as DioknoFootnote ³⁹ and EnriquezFootnote ⁴⁰ deem inherent in the ethnocentric formulation of the Filipino identity, i.e. the ‘us’ in the ‘from-us-for-us’ formulation that is distinct and separate from the Other ‘them’. Thus, despite its supposed embrace of cultural relativism, the movement is also ironically accused of replacing Western-centric ethnocentrism with ‘homegrown’ ethnocentrism by merely reversing and reappropriating the arguments, terms, and logic of colonialism.

For its more contemporary proponents, however, Salazar has been very clear about its project’s primary focus and exact scope from the outset, that is, the creation and advancement of an autonomous, robust, and panoptic tayo or ‘us’. As such, their relative sympathy for the national language in pursuing this overarching goal does not necessarily make it essentialist or ethnocentric. Instead, pantayong pananaw experts like GuillermoFootnote ⁴¹ and MendozaFootnote ⁴² have explained the movement’s supposed essentialism (and by extension, its perceived ethnocentrism) as a pragmatic strategy towards non-essentialist (and non-ethnocentric) alternatives for understanding Filipino identity and the cultural politics underpinning it. Given the largely underdeveloped ‘national’ intellectual-philosophical grounds on which it is operating due to centuries of total colonialism, the widely shared view among the adherents is that the movement must focus its still scarce resources and embryonic power on fortifying itself before it can have any meaningful influence over what is happening beyond the tayo or ‘us’ boundary.Footnote ⁴³ Accordingly, in searching for that ‘authentic’ Filipinoness upon which a unifying Filipino consciousness is expected to emerge, pantayong pananaw has been unapologetically nationalist both in aspiration and discourse. Notwithstanding their acceptance of a multifaceted pantayo-ness, Salazar and his followers perceive local history as being intrinsically tied to national history. While this certainly risks transforming the movement into an oppressive tool similar to the colonial legacies which they aim to dismantle in the first place, Curaming points out how many pantayong pananaw supporters view nationalism as the necessary antithesis and antidote to colonialism.Footnote ⁴⁴

The foundation of this nationalist pursuit is predicated on the movement’s rather reductionist interpretation of the Filipinos’ lived experiences with colonialism. From a pantayong pananaw lens, most of the nation’s gravest problems, be it inequality, corruption, impunity, or violent conflicts, are the direct upshots and legacies of colonialism. The long shadow cast by colonialism has prevented the Filipinos from developing a strong and confident sense of tayo or ‘us’, which explains and exacerbates the longstanding division among them. In other words, despite being an ambivalent experience, colonialism has been reduced to a black-and-white phenomenon that inadvertently excuses the transgressions of other equally culpable actors, particularly the country’s politico-economic elites and their predatory interests.Footnote ⁴⁵ Such a rather misguided and narrow causal analysis inevitably weakens the movement’s emancipatory capacity, which otherwise would have allowed Filipinos to become the principal agents and custodians of their future history.

These decolonial and particularistic features of the pantayong pananaw movement have significant implications for its capacity to serve as a decolonial master fantasy for securing the idealized Filipino identity, homeland, and nation-state amidst the lingering ontological lack and anxiety brought about by colonialism. As I demonstrate in the succeeding section where I probe its role and impact vis-à-vis the ethnoreligious relations between the majority Filipino Catholics and minoritized Bangsamoro Muslims in the context of postcolonial Philippine nation-state building, the pursuit of ontological security carries political implications and, therefore, must always be considered alongside issues of power and exclusion. Fantasy can aid in this analysis because it highlights the inherently arbitrary, and thus political, attempts to fill ontological gaps with specific objects. In this case, viewing pantayong pananaw as a form of fantasy helps illuminate not only its adherents’ and members’ subjective drive for ontological security, but equally important, the underlying (and often imbalanced) power relations at play. In theoretically constructing, epistemologically narrating, and politically implementing the pantayong pananaw fantasy, certain identities and possible futures are suppressed through a desire-driven narrative closure that reinforces a single version of social reality aligned with an idealized vision of Filipino identity, homeland, and nation-statehood.

The pantayong pananaw’s nationalist and anti-colonial thrust versus its nativism towards the Bangsamoro Muslims

At the heart of the pantayong pananaw movement is the lifelong aspiration to produce and propagate an overarching national discourse intended to fortify and unite the Philippines’ archipelagic nation after centuries of colonial imprisonment. For Salazar, there exists an ‘originary cultural anchor’, that is, the dunia Melayu or the Malay world, waiting to be rediscovered and reclaimed by the Filipinos if they were to succeed as a sovereign nation.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hence, one of the movement’s primary objectives is to offer a pathway for resisting or at least neutralizing colonial influences that have been deeply ingrained in the everyday lives of the ordinary people, and which prevent them from fully realizing their ‘original’ identity and values as Filipinos. Here, the nation as a concept necessitates some premodern ethnic elements and is almost always founded on older, pre-existing ethnie. And out of this arrangement, a genuine and authentic form of Filipinoness is envisioned to crystallize, one which would allow the members to prioritize and take pride in their affiliation with the Filipino identity, homeland, and nation-state over other competing signifiers. Underpinning this view is an understanding that the colonial experience, to use Ahmed’s term, does not necessarily ‘stick’ or function as a ‘sticky object’, which, in turn, allows Salazar to fantasize about the possibility of recovering and reconnecting with the long-lost indigenous, truly native self and subjectivity of the Filipinos.Footnote ⁴⁷

Adhering to this view, however, requires one to directly confront the nativist tendency that emanates from it. This form of nativism is reflected in the movement’s propensity to subscribe to Salazar’s notion of an imaginary ‘great cultural divide’ demarcating the native and non-foreign-influenced subjects from the foreign or foreign-influenced ones.Footnote ⁴⁸ Given that only a small percentage of the locals, mainly the elites and the educated ones, had been substantially influenced by the Spanish, Salazar believes that an untainted Filipino could re-emerge and be reborn. While the Westernized group had already been cut off from the imagined native Malayo-Polynesian cultural anchor, Salazar insists that the remaining majority was able to preserve its native core and, by this virtue, can and should serve as the custodian of the genuinely indigenous Filipino culture.Footnote ⁴⁹ The implication here is that the Filipinos’ lived experiences with colonialism were a skin-deep disturbance that barely altered the constitutive characteristics and elements of the ‘Filipino culture’.

Guillermo and Curaming have approached these nativist allegations from different angles. Guillermo, for instance, maintains that not a single adherent of the pantayong pananaw movement ‘can consciously take’ the ‘strongest and blatantly “nativist” position’, claiming that ‘a closer acquaintance with PP’s [pantayong pananaw] programmatic statements and corpus of writings would frustrate any responsible scholar who wanted to pin it down to fixed “nativist” […] positions’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Meanwhile, Curaming takes the view that the movement’s nativist bent may be understood as a strategic instrument or a contingent device for securing its goal of fully developing the ‘tayo’ (us).Footnote ⁵¹ The expectation is that the tayo (us) will become strong and encompassing enough to then allow the present and future pantayong pananaw advocates to temporarily cast off their (un)conscious nativist inclination.

Embracing pantayong pananaw’s nativist tendency, however, can have profound and lasting negative impacts on everyday ethnoreligious relations in the Philippines, which can ultimately undo the benefits expected to be gained from the movement’s nationalist and anti-colonial thrust. This is highly evident in the contentious and tumultuous cultivation of the Filipino Catholic identity, homeland, and overarching nation-state – in juxtaposition to the Bangsamoro Muslim entity – via the Filipinization process amidst the ontological insecurities confronting both groups. Understood as the ideological construction of a Filipino subjectivity and consciousness, Hernandez claims that this process has only perpetuated the very same colonial hegemonic violence that its Filipino ilustrado proponents sought to eradicate by transforming the (non)material structures of colonial oppression into nationalist ideals ‘that assume legal and political power unto themselves in a self-referential and self-legitimating fashion’.Footnote ⁵² In cultivating and propagating this notion of a ‘native’ Filipino subjectivity and identity to the point of fetishization, the Filipinization agenda was primarily conceptualized with the Hispanized and Christianized locals in mind, inevitably marginalizing those who continued to disavow the Spanish colonial authority, particularly the Bangsamoro Muslims.

Historically speaking, by the time the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century and introduced Christianity, Islam had already taken firm root in Mindanao in the south, as well as in certain areas of Luzon in the north and the Visayas in the central Philippines. Despite this, Spain was able to colonize and convert much of the northern and central parts of the archipelago to Hispanic Christianity. As Spanish colonial control expanded, their ambition to bring the entire Philippines under colonial rule and Christian influence pushed them to extend their campaigns further south. However, their efforts to conquer and subdue the Muslim populations met with limited success. For a long time, the Islamic sultanates of Mindanao were able to successfully resist Spanish incursions by waging jihad and various forms of guerrilla warfare, at times with support from British and Dutch forces.Footnote ⁵³ And although the once ferocious Moro Muslim resistance was eventually weakened by the late nineteenth century, Spain never fully succeeded in establishing complete control over the southern regions.

Against this backdrop, Filipinization has effectively become a vehicle for the Hispanic Christianization of the colonized bodies, transforming those affected into passive entities that have remained subservient to the Spanish empire long after the colonization ended.Footnote ⁵⁴ Likewise, through Filipinization, the ilustrado group that was supposed to lead the Filipinos’ genuine emancipatory struggle against their Spanish colonizers was able to preserve their privileged position over the rest of the subjugated subaltern by giving them the platform to preserve and further their own interests while framing their Filipino Catholic-oriented nationalist cause as anti-colonial. In espousing a duplicitous discourse that essentially replicated Eurocentric superiority and by claiming the Philippines as their birthright sovereign inheritance, the earlier phases of elite-led Filipinization further ensconced and legitimized the underlying systemic structures of colonial epistemic violence and oppression. Indeed, as Untalan puts it, the ‘existential satisfaction’ which, in this case, the privileged Filipino Catholic group and their elites derived from Filipinization was significantly tied to an egotistic sense of who they believed and thought they were and ought to be in juxtaposition to the othered Bangsamoro Muslims.Footnote ⁵⁵ In this project, concern for the othered (or lack thereof) was a mere function of the extent to which the other was deemed to endanger or secure the self, enabling its architects to ignore the destructive impacts of othering intrinsic to Filipinization. The resulting (non)physical/material violence has since continued to perpetuate the (neo)colonialist logic of survival and power accumulation which the pantayong pananaw master fantasy risks aggravating further.

The pantayong pananaw’s ‘inside looking in’ orientation versus its essentialism towards the Bangsamoro Muslims

The pantayong pananaw movement is also transparent about its intended audience and primary purpose – that historical knowledge and knowledge production are for the in-group members’ use to help them understand themselves better as a group.Footnote ⁵⁶ This gives the approach its internalist, ‘inside looking in’ orientation, which should not be surprising considering the literal meaning of the term pantayong pananaw, which is ‘from-us-for-us perspective’. As noted earlier, the use of ‘tayo’ in ‘pang-tayo’ indicates the position of the speaker as a member of the group they are speaking to. In terms of its audience, the ‘pang-tayo’ discourse effectively takes place among members of the same group such as a community, nation, or civilization. This inward-looking orientation, however, has triggered accusations of essentialism on the part of pantayong pananaw’s most conservative proponents, including Salazar himself.

For one, the insistence on treating and using the Tagalog-based Filipino as the legitimate and exclusive language of discourse despite nearly two hundred different languages being spoken across the archipelago is a prime manifestation of the movement’s essentialist tendency.Footnote ⁵⁷ For these proponents, Filipino is the only medium that has the capacity to capture and express the true essence of what it means to be a Filipino and the ‘Filipino experience’ and, as such, should enable the members to eventually achieve cultural holism. This type of essentialism is also manifested in the tendency of some of the movement’s most uncompromising members who believe in the existence of an unadulterated Filipino culture free from the side effects of colonialism, allowing them to distinguish between those who have been afflicted by Western influences (mainly the elites) and those who somehow managed to be immune to these forces (mainly the masses) and, therefore, embody the authentic Filipinoness.Footnote ⁵⁸ In both examples, culture is viewed more as an arena for unity and accord rather than a highly contentious site of struggle and resistance. In response, Guillermo underscores that the movement’s ‘superficial sympathy’ with an essentialist position is tied to its members’ view that the pace at which culture evolves aligns more closely with the idea of the longue durée, which, by rationalizing the ideas of coherence and stability in historical patterns, allows them to identify certain ‘essential’ features evident from these patterns.Footnote ⁵⁹ Moreover, by framing this essentialist tendency as ‘strategic essentialism’, Mendoza deems it a fundamental feature of knowledge production and a precondition of analysis necessary for advancing the political projects of the marginalized groups.Footnote ⁶⁰

Accepting pantayong pananaw’s essentialist propensity (alongside its nativist tendency), however, adds more serious impediments that can undermine whatever advantage the proponents expect to gain from espousing a closed circuit, ‘inside looking in’ orientation. This problem is exacerbated by the underlying yet highly visible politics of mnemonical security, which, in the past, has helped secure the memories and remembrances of Filipino Catholics by delegitimizing, if not outright criminalizing, those of the Bangsamoro Muslims. Believing that their history and identity are intrinsically linked to their Spanish colonizers, this ‘securitization of memory’ as Mälksoo calls it,Footnote ⁶¹ has contributed to the production and dissemination of popular texts chronicling Philippine history as the history of the Filipino Catholics’ crusade against the perceived threat posed by Islam and the Muslims in the south.Footnote ⁶²

These scripts about the Moro Muslim threat have been socialized via the Philippine educational system, which, through its Tagalog-centric curricula, aided in the circulation of the chauvinistic belief that peace and unity in the Philippines would only be possible if the Muslims in the south abandoned Islam for Christianity. Such securitized memories inevitably shaped how many Filipino Catholics came to interpret and understand the dire conditions afflicting the Moro Muslims as the mere outcomes of the latter’s inherently ‘inferior’ nature. Likewise, the Philippine government’s prejudiced formulation of its socioeconomic agenda for Mindanao further buttressed the anti-Muslim view that the ‘Moro problem’ was largely due to the ‘fanaticism’ and ‘ignorance’ of the Muslims in the south. These have all contributed to the reduction of the Moro Muslims to a pejorative caricature that ultimately led to their otherness and dehumanization in the eyes of many Filipino Catholics.

The subsequent ‘Moro wars’ launched by the state to forcefully integrate them via the twin processes of Filipinization and Christianization only exacerbated their resentment against the Philippine Republic and the Filipino Catholics. Yet, paradoxically, through the state’s continued promotion of the Spanish-conceived Filipino Catholic identity, a bond was formed among those Filipinos who embraced their colonial kinship with Spain and her Church. As time passed, more robust cultural and institutional boundaries emerged, further entrenching the already profound socio-psychological barriers between the two factions. As the Catholicized Filipinos started to fully accept their newly imagined identity and homeland, the Moro Muslims continued to endure the hardships rooted in their otherness and strangeness, compelling them to begin reimagining and reviving their ontologically distinctive ethnoreligious identity and homeland anchored in Islamic nationalism.Footnote ⁶³ Thus, rather than dissolving these multiple intertwining binaries inherent in a pluralistic postcolonial polity, the pantayong pananaw’s rather parochial orientation risks further entrapping the Filipino subjects within what Untalan describes as ‘Fanonian master-slave pseudo-dialectic’ where the othered are continually reduced to an ‘embittered copy of the master Self’.Footnote ⁶⁴

The pantayong pananaw’s cultural relativism ethos versus its ultranationalism towards the Bangsamoro Muslims

Consistent with its emphasis on giving priority and importance to their own members and achieving collective self-understanding, pantayong pananaw (un)consciously espouses cultural relativism as an analytical ethos. Cognizant of the perils of judging a nation’s developmental progress with respect to others’ trajectories and standards, it staunchly rejects such comparative evaluations. Instead, in the pantayong pananaw social order, each group is supposed to be entitled to its own distinct worldview and a corresponding way of life that is shaped by, and emerging in response to, the conditions unique to its context.Footnote ⁶⁵ Consequently, every group is considered on its own terms to avoid damaging comparisons (between the ‘more’ and ‘less’ developed or advanced ones) that only serve to further reinforce and justify the existing unjust hierarchies among them.

A corollary effect of this predilection towards cultural relativism, however, is the reliance on ultranationalism as a vehicle for creating and propagating a unified and coherent national history and identity. Central to this vision is the retrieval and revival of a pre-colonial Filipinoness upon which the modern Filipino national consciousness could be anchored. Consequently, despite Salazar’s acknowledgement of the presence of local and civilizational discourses as evidence of a multilayered pantayo-ness, he remains chained to the idea that local history is an endogenous (i.e. constitutive) rather than an exogenous (i.e. autonomous) element of that imagined overarching Filipino national history.Footnote ⁶⁶ But while critics like Claudio reject this ultra-nationalistic formulation as being counterproductive to the movement’s goal, especially within a highly pluralistic polity,Footnote ⁶⁷ many prominent left-leaning historians, including the likes of Constantino, Agoncillo, and Zaide, tend to view this longstanding quest for a nationalist Filipino history as an inherently moral and upright cause; hence, the lack of appetite for a post-nationalist or anti-nationalist discourse.Footnote ⁶⁸

Consenting to pantayong pananaw’s ultra-nationalistic tendency (alongside its nativist and essentialist stance) can further aggravate the already tense everyday ethnoreligious relations in postcolonial Philippines, putting into question cultural relativism’s supposed value as a guiding ethos. While some point out how ultranationalism has been weaponized by the political elite to secure their narrow self-interests,Footnote ⁶⁹ others condemn its discriminatory impact with respect to all other minoritized groups being compelled to remould their identities to be included and gain access to the ideological and institutional structures controlled by the dominant group.Footnote ⁷⁰ If left unchecked, this ultra-nationalistic ‘externality’ that is simultaneously induced by and fuelling the construction of Filipinoness can turn into an oppressive device that is just as destructive as the colonialism that it vows to thwart.

Historically, these warnings have solid bases, particularly when examined in the context of the Philippine state’s attempts at securitizing the Bangsamoro Muslim entity as an existential threat to the Filipino Catholic identity, homeland, and nation-state (in juxtaposition to the Bangsamoro Muslim identity) amidst the ontological insecurities of everyday ethnoreligious politics between the two factions. Following Spain’s defeat to the Americans in 1898, the Philippines was immediately annexed as a US colonial territory under the Treaty of Paris despite the Moro Muslims’ continued struggle against the new colonial power.Footnote ⁷¹ In response, the US-controlled state implemented programmes designed to capture the loyalty of the sultans and the datus in the south by allowing them to gain more power for themselves through the patronage system they set up as the other clan leaders continued with their resistance.Footnote ⁷² Exploiting this divide and absence of an effective centralized authority among the local Muslim leaders, the Americans deployed assimilation strategies that subjugated them and their lands further under the overarching Philippine nation-state. One primary example was the violent transmigration policy implemented to facilitate the large-scale relocations of Catholic settlers from the north to Mindanao that steadily displaced many local Moro Muslim residents and led to brutal disputes over lands and resources.Footnote ⁷³ The policy significantly contributed to the remarkable demographic shift in the south by reducing the size of the Moro Muslim inhabitants to less than 20 percent of the region’s population.Footnote ⁷⁴

The situation deteriorated further when the Americans began delegating some administrative powers to Filipino bureaucrats more than two decades after colonizing the country. This was understandably seen by the Moro Muslims as yet another exploitative attempt by the Filipino Catholic political elites to seize ownership and control of Bangsamoro ancestral lands and to convert their inhabitants to Catholicism and, therefore, a flagrant attack on their sovereign Islamic life.Footnote ⁷⁵ Suffering from intensifying discrimination and oppression at the hands of their own ‘Filipino countrymen’, the Moro Muslims fiercely opposed the possibility of being subsumed under a burgeoning Filipino Catholic nation-state, opting for the restoration of direct American control of the south instead. Notwithstanding these protests, their fears materialized with the successful inauguration of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935 as the leaders of the newly re-established government continued with their hard-line policies towards Mindanao, which they considered vital to nurturing the infant state even at the expense of the local Moro Muslim population.Footnote ⁷⁶ Doubling down on its unjust land resettlement and resource redistribution programmes that unduly privileged and benefited the Catholic settlers, the embryonic Philippine state inevitably came to be regarded by the aggrieved Moro Muslims as the successor of their previous colonial nemesis.Footnote ⁷⁷

The pantayong pananaw’s exclusivity strategy versus its binarism towards the Bangsamoro Muslims

In the pantayong pananaw realm, the exclusivity resulting from its inward-looking, nationalist orientation serves a strategic purpose: to enable the movement to progressively expand its zone of intellectual influence to the point of encompassing the discourse of kabihasnan. Footnote ⁷⁸ The term kabihasnan is conceived by the movement as the Filipino antidote to the Western-centric understanding of civilization. It does so by representing the sum totality of a group’s ‘practices, institutions, values, history, and culture’ working against the colonial social, political, or cultural conditions to which its members have long been exposed, thereby giving them certain levels of ‘indigenous’ skills and expertise to address the problems arising from these conditions.Footnote ⁷⁹ When confronting a different set of conditions, a different group can be expected to develop unique principles and customs which, while they may not be suitable to other groups, would nonetheless constitute and underpin its own kabihasnan. The movement’s kabihasnan framework, therefore, militates against the totalizing and absolutist Eurocentric view of civilization, emphasizing instead the paramount importance of providing people with the effective mechanisms that will help them live a secure and happy life regardless of the form of kabihasnan that emerges out of the groups’ lived experiences vis-à-vis the respective sets of conditions in which they are operating.

The binarism that inevitably emerges from this exclusivist strategy, however, further exacerbates the nativism, essentialism, and ultranationalism that pantayong pananaw is already being charged with. In demarcating the ideological boundaries of Filipino identity vis-à-vis the others, the movement is accused of merely supplanting colonialist ethnocentrism with a more indigenous variant of ethnocentrism and, as such, does not do enough in promoting genuine emancipation for all. Because the existence of the tayo (us) is intrinsically dependent on the existence of the sila (them), the pantayong pananaw gets ensnared within the cyclical mechanism of counter-identification which essentially reverses the positional relationship between the colonialist and the subjugated.Footnote ⁸⁰ By helping facilitate the rewriting of the terms, scripts, and rituals of colonialism between the formerly subjugated (e.g. the Filipino Catholics) and a new target group (e.g. the Bangsamoro Muslims), the movement is held hostage by the very same logic used to justify colonialism. Responding to these allegations, the pantayong pananaw interlocutors, particularly Guillermo, underscore the primary referent object of the movement, which is the creation and propagation of a robust and self-directed overarching tayo (us).Footnote ⁸¹ Severely weighed down by hundreds of years of successive colonial regimes, the movement is not able to mediate with issues outside of this singular goal while still coping with the lack and anxiety induced by what Vieira calls the ‘ambivalent postcolonial subjectivity’ of its members. That said, the expectation is that as the movement continues to advance and develop, its members will acquire the necessary capacity and influence to take meaningful action on matters beyond their imagined boundaries.Footnote ⁸²

Adhering to such rationalizations towards binarism, however, can have grave repercussions for the conduct and outcome of everyday ethnoreligious politics between the Filipino Catholics and Moro Muslims in the Philippines that outweigh the supposed benefits of relying on exclusivity as a strategy for consolidating the movement. Continuing with the discussion above regarding the framing of the Bangsamoro Muslim entity as an existential threat to Filipinoness underscores the devastating effects that binarism (in conjunction with the nativism, essentialism, and ultranationalism attributed to pantayong pananaw) can further inflict upon the already fractured relations between the two ethnoreligious groups. By the early 1960s, the Moro Muslim insurgents had already begun embarking on armed rebellion against imperial Manila with the goal of creating their own autonomous territory encompassing Sulu, Basilan, and Zamboanga.Footnote ⁸³ These efforts paved the way for the establishment of the Muslim Independence Movement (eventually renamed the Mindanao Independence Movement) in 1968, which promised to invoke their right to carry out jihad to secure the Bangsamoro identity and homeland.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Philippine state, then under the authoritarian leadership of the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, brutally responded by sanctioning a string of violent policies which occasionally resulted in massacres of Moro Muslims.Footnote ⁸⁵

The fierce backlash and counterattacks by Moro Muslim rebels soon escalated into a civil war that precipitated the formation of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) immediately after Marcos’ Martial Law declaration in 1972. Led by a mixed group of modern and traditional Muslim elites from the region, the MNLF heralded the beginning of a renewed and more consolidated Bangsamoro separatist movement, the overarching goal of which was the formal creation of the Bangsamoro Republic. Vowing to deliver swift justice to their people and restore the freedom and sovereignty stolen from them, the MNLF leaders created their own Bangsa Moro Army in their quest to defeat and break free from the neocolonial clutches of imperial Manila.Footnote ⁸⁶ But while the MNLF initially gained some support from the international Islamic community, the eventual signing of the 1976 Tripoli Agreement and the subsequent conclusion of the 1996 Peace Agreement drastically changed the coalition’s main thrust and priority. The decision of its founding chairman, Nur Misuari, to accept the agreement’s clause of granting the Bangsamoro people their political autonomy, albeit within the jurisdiction of the overarching Philippine state, proved to be massively unpopular among the MNLF leaders and members alike.Footnote ⁸⁷

Unable to resolve these differences, Hashim Salamat, MNLF’s then vice-chairman, broke away from the group and established the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).Footnote ⁸⁸ Soon after its creation, the splinter group denounced the peace agreement and called on its members to continue with their original mission. Since its inception, the relationship between the Philippine government and the MILF has shifted between deadly military collisions and temporary ceasefires. The situation only started to improve in 2008 when the Memorandum of Understanding on the Ancestral Domain (MOU-AD) mediated by Malaysia was signed between the Philippine government and the MILF.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, within only a few months after its initial signing, the country’s highest court ruled the MOU-AD unconstitutional after influential non-Muslim Filipino politicians challenged the agreement’s legal basis, causing decades of unresolved grievances and tensions to re-erupt into periodic violent conflicts over the succeeding years until BARMM’s formal creation in 2019.Footnote ⁹⁰

The pantayong pananaw’s cultural holism goal versus its reductionism towards the Bangsamoro Muslims

Despite the limitations presented by the particularistic tendencies being attributed to pantayong pananaw (i.e. nativism, essentialism, ultranationalism, and binarism), its primary proponents remain optimistic in its capacity to bring about the cultural holism required to bind all Filipinos together. Accordingly, the movement has made it its mission to overcome the invisible, albeit existing, great cultural divide (particularly, between the Westernized and ‘non-Westernized’ Filipinos) that remains deeply entrenched in postcolonial Philippines. Amidst the lingering colonial mentality afflicting many, the absence of a robust and stable tayo (us) has long been believed to be the root problem hindering the birth of a united, complete, and coherent Filipino. Such a diagnosis presupposes that a nation can only have one primary culture, compelling Salazar to advocate for the espousal of Tagalog-based Filipino as the movement’s primary linguistic vehicle towards achieving cultural holism.Footnote ⁹¹ This rather dogmatic prescription is underpinned by his view that Tagalog is the only language that possesses the necessary features and capacity to serve as both a repository and a transmitter of meanings that most Filipinos are believed to share and supposed to understand.Footnote ⁹²

Subscribing to pantayong pananaw’s cultural holism goal, however, risks reducing colonialism into a black-and-white phenomenon that homogenizes the vastly differentiated vulnerabilities and experiences of the colonized people. In virtually all parts of the world, colonialism was a profoundly ambivalent experience for both the colonizers and the colonized.Footnote ⁹³ Despite this, the movement has the tendency to frame all of the country’s major problems as the direct outcomes of the colonizers’ actions, preventing people from developing a national consciousness that might help them understand one another better. This proves particularly problematic and complicated amidst the ontological insecurities induced by the everyday ethnoreligious politics between the Filipino Catholics and Bangsamoro Muslims in the Philippines. To this day, many non-Muslim Filipinos, especially the Catholics, remain suspicious of the prospect of granting the Moro Muslims political autonomy, fearing that the decision would ultimately lead to the complete separation of Mindanao from the Philippines. The widely held belief among the Bangsamoro Muslims that Islam concerns not just the religious but also the political aspects of their community has put their motivation for seeking self-determination into serious question, not least by those Filipino leaders who have always deemed Bangsamoro autonomy as a threat to the Philippines’ national identity and sovereign borders.Footnote ⁹⁴

Against this backdrop, the Filipino Catholic majority, through its effective control of the central government and its political institutions, has effectively embedded its ethnoreligious substructures (including cultural myths, doctrines, norms, and dogma) right into the overarching state’s security superstructures (encompassing national security discourse, policies, strategies, and institutions), allowing its members to sustain their dominant power and position relative to the othered.Footnote ⁹⁵ The idea was to ensure the purity, sacredness, and indivisibility of the supposedly genuine Filipino identity, homeland, and territorial nation-state. Consequently, the Philippine state’s longstanding approach has been severely limited to the imposition of extractive, rather than inclusive, politico-economic and sociocultural policies that steadily reduced the Bangsamoro Muslims’ capacity to participate and contribute to nation-state building on equal footing.Footnote ⁹⁶

The relegation of their rights and causes to the margins of national politics significantly undermined their capacity to advocate for and use their own ethnoreligious substructures to influence and generate the necessary security superstructures that would have helped them secure their ideal Bangsamoro Muslim identity, homeland, and territorial nation-state. The decades-long failures of former colonial officials, as well as the local leaders who eventually replaced them, to develop and promote inclusive institutions that seriously took into consideration the plight and future of the Moro Muslims within the overarching Philippine nation-state underlined the lack of genuine interest on the part of the state to acknowledge the rights and existence of the latter within their own homeland. To this day, a huge portion of the Muslim population in Mindanao considers themselves as Filipinos only on paper, preferring instead to be identified in terms of their ethnicity and clan rather than their supposed nationality.Footnote ⁹⁷

Yet, despite such hurdles, compared to other minoritized ethnoreligious groups embroiled in violent protracted conflicts across Southeast Asia, the Bangsamoro Muslims have achieved significant successes in reclaiming and reasserting their own being. Their unceasing efforts to cultivate and spread their ontologically distinct Moro Islamic nationalism have helped fuel their fierce struggles for liberation from the Catholic-dominated Philippine nation-state, enabling them to partially fulfil their quest for Bangsamoro sovereignty. Primary evidence of this relative success was the ratification of Republic Act No. 11054, more commonly known as the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL), in fulfilment of the agreements outlined in the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro between the MILF and the Philippine government. Upon its signing by former President Rodrigo Duterte on 26 July 2018, the BOL facilitated the replacement of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) with the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region (BAR), which is intended to serve as the overarching administrative framework for Bangsamoro governance.

But as with the previous peace agreements, the new law has been contested by various groups on multiple fronts. Notable among them were the non-Muslim religious leaders (representing the Christian and indigenous populations across the BARMM region’s key provinces including Basilan, Cotabato, Lanao del Norte, and Zamboanga) who rejected the idea of living under the jurisdiction of the Bangsamoro Transition Authority out of fear of being victimized by the Moro Muslims.Footnote ⁹⁸ The situation took a turn for the worse following the grave clashes between the Philippine security forces and Islamic militants affiliated with the Islamic State, specifically the Maute and Abu Sayyaf Salafi Jihadist groups in what came to be known as the Marawi Siege.Footnote ⁹⁹ Responding to intelligence reports that Isnilon Hapilon, leader of the notorious Abu Sayyaf group, was in Marawi to meet with Maute militants, the Armed Forces of the Philippines launched an offensive that lasted for five months between May and October 2017, becoming the longest urban battle in contemporary Philippine history. The unforeseen magnitude and severity of the crisis led to Duterte’s martial law declaration in Mindanao that continued until 31 December 2019. In the end, the siege was estimated to have killed more than a thousand peopleFootnote ¹⁰⁰ and forcibly displaced 98 percent of the city’s total population,Footnote ¹⁰¹ the majority of whom are Moro Muslims who continue to bear the brunt of these conflicts.