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Carcar, Cebu

January 29, 2009 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

I’m not entirely certain what winding mental path led me to the rectory of St. Catherine’s Church in Carcar, Cebu. Some of it has to do with reading for a course on literature of social movements in the Philippines — it was to Carcar that the Visayan revolutionary Leon Kilat went seeking reinforcements for his stand against the Spanish army in Cebu city, only to be betrayed and murdered.

And I’m thinking, more generally, about where historical research and investigative journalism intersect and overlap. More on that later, perhaps. In the meantime, some photos from this summer:

Naked Saints

Fallen Angel #1

Fallen Angel #3

Fallen Angel #2

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How does Thailand get away with it?

January 20, 2009 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

In the latest in a long string of outrageous human rights and civil liberties violations perpetrated by the Thai government, political scientist Giles Ji Ungpakorn is facing prison for lese majeste — insulting the king — in a recent article about the 2006 Thai coup.

You can read the offending paragraphs here and judge for yourselves.

He’s not the only writer to face such charges — an aspiring Australian novelist was just sentenced to three years for the same offense. But there’s something particularly chilling about this case. Ji Ungpakorn is an academic of international stature. Chulalongkorn, the university where he is a lecturer, is (along with Thamassat) one of the top two universities in Thailand, his work is read and cited by academics across the globe, and he is the son of national hero Dr. Puey Ungpakorn.

There doesn’t seem to be any element of “let’s see if we can get away with this.” Instead, it seems to be a clear and deliberate message to critics that prominence is no protection.

Usually the media’s all over this kind of stuff. But I’ve seen very little about this case. In Thailand, it’s explained by a call from the Minister of Justice to refrain from covering lese majeste cases. With the international media, it’s a little bit more complicated. [Read more...]

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More Rizal

April 29, 2008 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

I’m back to Jose Rizal again. For someone whose professed interest is human rights and modern political science, I seem to spend a lot of time studying 19th century intellectual history. (It is all related, I swear!). For all that I find many of Rizal’s political stances objectionable, I can’t help but feel great affection for the man when I actually read his work.

This letter, written to Filipino revolutionary Mariano Ponce in 1889, made me laugh:

Dear Friend,

I have sent you the proofs long ago. If you did not receive them, they must have been lost. Send me immediately other proofs; I have the manuscript.
We have many enemies and they are furious. Let us face the fight so that we shall not be disunited.
I am going to the library.

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Meanwhile…

February 8, 2008 By Isabel Esterman 1 Comment

These past few weeks have been incredibly busy. On top of all the usual nonsense, I have to get ready for my trip to Southeast Asia, I’m going to be presenting a paper at a grad student conference at Cornell in March, and I’m spending a lot of time trying to persuade people to let me take their pictures.

As part of my preparations for going to Thailand and Burma, I decided to be sensible for a change and take adequate health precautions, so I went to the clinic yesterday to get all of my shots. I feel poked full of holes, have a lingering soreness in my left arm (Hep A) and can barely lift my right arm (tetanus and polio). I also have live typhoid (in therapeutic quantities) sitting in my fridge. Irritatingly, it has to be kept refrigerated, and has to be taken two hours after and one hour before eating — so it will sit there until I can get organized enough to come home to my refrigerator before I’m so hungry I’m about to pass out. Could be a while.

I’m working on two new photo projects as well. One is a multimedia piece about flamenco in the Bay Area, and the other a photo essay on gender and gender politics. I’ve always been pretty comfortable with asking strangers if I can photograph them, but working on more in-depth projects requires a much higher level of access to people’s lives, so it’s an interesting challenge. It’s good for me, though, to have work to do that requires going out and interacting with people, instead of just holing up in the library or my room.

I’m also revisiting my paper on the Rizal Morga to present at Cornell. There are a few things that should be improved, but mostly I’m just trying to condense it.

This has really turned into a list here, but I wanted to put up something. I think this will be my first “apologizing for not posting more” post in a while.

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University of California – Bureaucracy

January 28, 2008 By Isabel Esterman 4 Comments

A new semester, and as usual I’ve spent most of the past week running from office to office trying to persuade people to bend the rules for me.
I really can’t decide whether there is something wrong with me or something wrong with the system that makes this such a pattern. As far as I understand, normal people do not do this. They sign up for classes online, show up, and that’s that.

Me, well…

Having to juggle multiple departments is a big part of why pulling my schedule together is always such an epic drama. As an undergrad, I completed 3 majors in 3 years, and now I’m working on two Master’s degrees simultaneously. So I have much more bureaucracy to deal with, and much less room to maneuver.

This semester’s big upset came from trying to join a journalism school class on Burma. International reporting, Southeast Asia – what could be more perfect, and (thanks to my past research and reporting in the region, not to mention those 3 majors competed and 2 Master’s in progress) something I’d like to think I’m pretty well qualified for. But of course there was a catch. Because of the way the dual degree program I’m in is set up, I have not yet taken one of the prerequisite J-school classes. But I applied anyway, and early last week a loophole, somehow, was found.

And then the next obstacle. The lecture component of the Burma class conflicts with Indonesian, which I’m absolutely required to take to remain eligible for my funding. So I had to convince my Indonesian teacher to let me take her course as an independent study, showing up twice a week instead of three times and working on my own to keep up with the class. Then I had to convince my advisor in the Group in Asian studies that this was okay. Then I had to double-check with the people who administer graduate fellowships that I could use an independent study course to meet their requirements. Then I had to get the department of South and Southeast Asian studies to sign off on my course plan for Indonesian.

It’s been raining like crazy all week, and I discovered it’s very, very hard for people to say no to me when I show up in their office wet and disheveled, making a sad face, and holding out damp papers for them to sign. It also helps that, unlike in Madison — where I had an actual nemesis who seemed to take personal affront at my I’m-such-a-special-snowflake attempts to bend the rules, and threw obstacles in my path at every possible opportunity (this woman is, to the infinite benefit of the students who follow me, no longer employed there) – everyone I met with actually wanted to help me. The University of California – Bureaucracy (just in case you were wondering what UC-B stands for) can be an absolute nightmare, but my experiences with the individual tentacles of the beast have been pretty good so far. The paperwork is still grinding through, but it looks like it’s all going to work out.

The upshot of all this is….I’m going to Thailand and Burma in March!

I won’t know for a few more days exactly where I’m going to be sent, and my project will obviously be location-specific, but no matter what, it’s going to be pretty amazing.

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The Arroyo Imbroglio

January 17, 2008 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

I highly recommend “The Arroyo Imbroglio in the Philippines,” political scientist (and former teacher of mine) Paul Hutchcroft’s new article in The Journal of Democracy to anyone interested in a lucid summary of a century of Philippine political history. In an impressively concise article (13 pages), Hutchcroft manages to address most of the key issues facing the Philippine political system — corruption, fraud, violence, human rights abuses, impunity, insurgency and public disenchantment — in a manner accessible to a non-specialist.

Although the Philippines can boast the oldest democratic structures in Asia, they are currently weak and lacking in legitimacy. Battered by scandal after scandal, these structures need careful and well-considered reform if they are to survive. read more..

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Head, Body and Feet; or, what I’ve been doing with my life

December 17, 2007 By Isabel Esterman 3 Comments

I’m pretty sure only one person will really appreciate this (and you will very quickly know who you are, my friend) but since I’ve been too busy and burned out to do any extra-curricular writing these last few days, I figured I’d post this:


One of the most common critiques of Rizal’s narrative of nationalism comes from left-leaning academics, who charge Rizal with elitism. Renato Constantino, for example, argues that while Rizal spoke in good faith about human rights and human dignity and used the language of universal ideals, he was essentially “voicing the goals of his class.”[1] He may have condemned the exploitation of peasants at the hands of encomenderos and friars, the argument goes, but did not question the underlying morality of social stratification.  A close reading of Rizal’s annotations in the Morga supports this analysis.  He seems genuinely outraged by the exploitation of peasants at hands of encomenderos and friars; yet while he decries the “tyranny of the oppressor” against the “poor class,” he does not question the existence of class itself. [2] Most tellingly, when de Morga explains the traditional constellation of Philippine classes as principales, plebians and slaves, Rizal simply concurs. “This is the eternal division one finds, and will find (in the future) everywhere, in all kingdoms and republics: ruling class, productive class, and servant class: head, body and feet.”[3]  It is, to say the least, difficult to imagine Rizal aspired to a sense of deep horizontal comradeship with someone he describes as being, eternally, a foot.



[1] Renato Constantino, Dissent and Counter-Consciousness (Quezon City: Malaya Books, Inc., 1970) p.135.

[2] Rizal-Morga, p. 300, referring here to Catholicism’s failure to liberate the poor.

[3] Ibid, 297, n. 2. “Esta es la division eterna que se encuentra y se encontrara en todas partes, en todos los reinos y republicas: clase dominadora, clase productora y clase servil: cabeza, cuerpo y pies.” In other notes, Rizal gives considerable attention to the question of slavery, generally condemning the practice, but noting that slavery in the Philippines was benign compared to European systems, and could more accutately be described as debt-bondage. (see footnotes p. 294.295)

__________________________________

I should note, also, that I got a chance to slag off Ileto, although I had to confine it to a footnote.  Let’s just say I have convincing evidence that he never read the Morga. 

Did we ever have lives?


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It’s that time of the semester again…

December 6, 2007 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment
Continuing my series of desk portraits, here is the wreckage of my desk as I near the home stretch of a marathon last-minute paper revising session:

It may not be a system of organization that works for anyone else, but I seem to have done alright for myself with it so far.
Now, if I can just stop procrastinating and find 2000 more words I can get rid of without undermining my thesis before my eyes totally give out, I may just be through with writing about impunity in the Philippines forever. 
Well, probably not forever, but I feel like a nice long break is in order.
I am so ready for the semester to be over.
UPDATE @ 2:30: Oh, it hurts, it hurts! Every line in this paper represents hours of research and writing. The fat’s trimmed off, so is a lot of the meat. I’m starting to hit bone.
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Cool-guy academics

November 28, 2007 By Isabel Esterman 2 Comments

During our discussion about Eric Tagliacozzo’s Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, one of my classmates coined a new term: “Cool-guy academic.” Which is to say, the type of academic — preferably as nerdy as possible — who focuses on “cool guy” topics like smuggling, piracy, drugs, organized crime and prostitution.
And I’m sitting there thinking, “guilty as charged.” With the exception of a few papers on nationalist historiography, every major project I’ve worked on in the last few years has been about sex, drugs or violence (or some combination of the above).
So I confessed.
“Why heroin? Why not rice?” a fellow student asked. At the time, I cracked a joke about actually wanting to find a job after grad school, unlike the PhD students in history I was surrounded by.
But it is a serious question. Take drugs, for example. An incredible amount of ink has been spilled about the role of opium and alcohol monopolies in financing and consolidating the colonial state. No one’s denying this revenue was important, but some recent scholarship suggests it may be exaggerated, or at least overemphasized. Meanwhile, other, less sexy, areas like rubber plantations and tin mining are seriously under-studied.
So I’ve been reflecting on my fascination with the ugly underbelly of society. Granted, I did have the ultimate cool-guy academic as my undergraduate advisor. But it goes back a lot further than that, and I think it’s fair to say that I wanted to work with McCoy because of my fascination with the illicit, rather than developing that fascination as a result of working with him.
I’ve been this way ever since I was a kid. I read every single holocaust book we had on the shelf, and anything else with comparably dark themes, from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to Shakespeare’s tragedies. A fascination, shall we say, for the morbid.
I’ve always seemed to want to fill my head with the most horrific information I can find. I’m not sure if that makes me a “cool guy.” But it definitely makes me something.

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October 3, 2007 By Isabel Esterman 5 Comments

Oh, I am so bad.
Looks like I’m back to posting about how I don’t ever post.
School seems to do this to me.
What can I say? By and large, I find what I’m doing in school interesting. Which is why I’m here. But it doesn’t make for great narrative. As in — I actually spent a fair chunk of my day in a very involved discussion about how to best diagram the fluid and variegated nature of the plural society that existed (according to some, but not all scholars) in the Burma Delta in the early twentieth century.
Actually though, today was a rather more interesting day than usual. I had the opportunity to have lunch with Zainah Anwar, the executive director of Sisters in Islam a feminist group based in Malaysia. Apart from offering a very interesting vision of Islam, one that manages to be both iconoclastic and devout, she was a fun person to get to hang out with for a bit. I am planning to write a profile of her for a class assignment, so more on her later.
I also had the chance to attend a screening of Agent Orange: A Personal Requiem by Masako Sakata, a visiting scholar from Japan at the J School. Her husband, an American Vietnam veteran, took ill and died, quite suddenly, at the age of 54. Masako’s search for insight into the underlying causes of his death pointed increasingly to his exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Eventually, her own personal quest to survive his death led Masako to travel throughout Vietnam, meeting Vietnamese villagers who suffer from diseases they believe are caused by the dioxin in Agent Orange, and whose children suffer from horrible birth defects, even 3 generations after the war.
It was a difficult film to watch — lots of long, lovingly shot cuts of terribly deformed children — but very moving, especially because Masako’s personal journey is so much a part of the story.
Unfortunately, the film is unlikely to get much distribution in the U.S., but keep an eye out for it.
…And now that I’ve cracked the guilt barrier about posting, perhaps I’ll be writing more.

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