preoccupations

Marlon Fuentes’ mockumentary Bontoc Eulogy (1995) invokes history, through archival footage, in telling a fictional narrative about the indigenous Igorot body as a historical artifact. Using Terry Goldie’s (1989) conception of historicity as a commodity in the semiotic field of the indigene, and the conception of the racialized/colonized body (DeMello 2014), this paper interrogates the film’s display of the Igorot body as representation of the indigene within the dominant discourse. I argue that while the film successfully utilizes historical research and archives in its critique of Empire, it also transmutes the materiality of the indigenous body into a historical artifact instead of as a living, breathing being.

Bontoc Eulogy’s narrative springs from the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, more popularly known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, told from the perspectives of the narrator and his grandfather, Markod, a Bontoc warrior. The narrator first expresses his interest in the Igorot as someone whose mother is one, then flawlessly slips into his grandfather’s voice, alternating it with his own. Recorded through a phonograph, Markod narrates (in Bontoc, translated into English by the narrator) his experiences as one the Igorots who was displayed during the St. Louis World Fair. The film makes use of both archival footage and photographs and cinematic footage taken by the filmmaker to advance the narrative, as well as non-Western and Western music in telling the story of Markod.

About the indigenous body

The emergence of race during the colonial era, i.e. Europeans coming into contact with people of the Americas, Asia, and Africa, springs from the classification systems which emerged to “categorize the variety of people on the planet…by skin color and facial features, but also by religion, language, and culture” (DeMello 2014, 102). These classification systems legitimized the colonial agenda of the Europeans, allowing them to claim dominion over the islands and continents they reached, naming these new territories after their sovereigns and saints. They also claimed superiority over the peoples they ‘conquered’ (massacred), and overemphasized the difference between white and non-white, thus overemphasizing the similarities and de-emphasizing the differences between the inferior races (ibid.).

The film focuses on the display of Filipino bodies at the St. Louis World’s Fair, in which three treatments of the racialized body are highlighted. First, racialized bodies were displayed in human zoos where “visitors could gawk at native people from colonized nations in reconstructed villages” (ibid., 104). In these fairs, the colonial agenda of claiming the inferiority of non-white races is validated when audiences witness how the non-white peoples behave. In the case of the Igorots in the film, they were made to perform their rituals everyday, such that Markod laments the loss of meaning in these rituals. These banked on stereotypes about the Igorots at the time:

“The Igorots of the Philippines, for example, were both tattooed and were known to eat dogs. Even though they only ate dogs for ceremonial occasions at home, the organizers of the St Louis Expo fed them dogs daily so that Americans could watch the spectacle. Human zoos and other native exhibits like this were contrasted with the highest achievements of Western society to both accentuate the primitiveness of the natives and to emphasize the civilization of the Western world.” (ibid.)

Second, racialized bodies were mapped and measured. The film recounts how the scientists or medical doctors measured the size of the Igorots’ heads and feet, and recorded these measurements. This was done in the name of biology and anthropology, a branch of the social sciences which studies humanity, including human biology, cultures, and species. Lastly, the racialized body is animalized, that is, equated with the animal as other. From displaying the brown bodies in their human zoos to transporting them from their homes to a foreign country like animals, the white colonizer engages in the dehumanization of non-white bodies. Contrasted with the white body, which symbolizes civilization, the brown body remains “wild and untouched by civilization” (Fuentes 1995).

Returning to the text itself, the film contains archival video footage and photographs from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, all institutions based in the United States. This is possible because during that period in Philippine history, the Americans were learning about their brown burdens, the subjects of their empire. This places the film squarely within the discourse of empire, and it uses the language of the empire against itself. Despite the colonial aim to record these footage for their museums and archives, Fuentes stitches them together through a story to depict the dehumanization of the indigenous Igorot body. Thus, the film serves as a site of resistance.

About historicity

However, in the words of Sharpe (1989), “the colonial subject who can answer the colonizers back is the product of the same vast ideological machinery that silences the subaltern” (143). This argument is based on the view that the colonial subject resists through the language, and within the educational, political, and cultural arena of the colonizer. Thus, as Slemon (1990) argues in relation to Sharpe, “literary resistance is necessarily in a place of ambivalence: between systems, between discursive worlds, implicit and complicit in both of them” (37). In this case, Bontoc Eulogy’s resistance is trapped between two systems of meaning. While it acts as a site of resistance against the colonizer’s archival memory, it also falls prey to the colonial signification of the indigene.

Goldie (1989) identifies five ‘commodities’ in the semiotics of the indigene: sexuality, violence, orality, mysticism, and historicity. Among these, the film engages mostly with the prehistoric, or how “the historicity of the text … shapes the indigene into an historical artifact, a remnant of a golden age that seems to have little connection to anything akin to contemporary life” (17). Goldie explains that the semiotic field of the indigene is both historical, because it holds within it a “a sense of the indigene as a historical value” and ahistorical, because it is “usually removed from historical necessity” (48).

In the film, the use of archival footage and photographs from American, i.e. colonizer, institutions is ambivalent. On the one hand, it shows the injustices inflicted upon the indigenous Igorots who were displaced from their homes and displayed in human zoos. On the other, the film also depicts the indigenous Igorot body as a historical artifact, legitimizing the reasons for recording the indigenous Igorots with cameras and rulers—to serve as a reminder of a ‘prehistoric’ past, which in the colonizer’s language means a lack of civilization. This is highlighted with the film interspersing archival footage with footage specifically taken for the film, since the latter contrasts rather clearly with the former.

However, I will not go as far as to say that the film is ahistorical. Obviously, the narrative context of the film and its use of historical archives places the film at a close proximity with history. In fact, an important implication in the film is the effect of human movement during colonialism, i.e. the diaspora, that the film shows how human movement during colonialism in the past affects the present and the future. The narrator says that his mother is of Bontoc descent, and thus his interest in the Igorots stems from this connection. Aside from this, he laments the fact that his children will never know his own country, the Philippines, because they lived in the United States.

As Slemon (1990) says of Sharpe’s article which argues that we must “examine the ways in which resistance in writing must go beyond the mere ‘questioning’ of colonialist authority” (36), I think that texts such as Bontoc Eulogy will benefit from an interrogation of its resistance. He further draws from Sharpe in saying that “resistance itself is therefore never purely resistance, never simply there in the text or the interpretive community, but is always necessarily complicit in the apparatus it seeks to transgress” (37). In any text, literary or media, that resists oppression and participates in decolonizing, it is important to determine the contradictions which makes the text ambivalent as resistive and complicit.

References:

Fuentes, Marlon, dir. 1995. Bontoc Eulogy. n.p.: Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Online video.

Goldie, Terry. 1989. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures. Kingston, Montreal, London: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Sharpe, Jenny. 1989. “Figures in Colonial Resistance.” Modern Fiction Studies 35 (1): 137-55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26282987.

Slemon, Stephen. 1990. “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World.” World Literature Written in English 30 (2): 30-41. doi: 10.1080/17449859008589130.