Reading the past, appreciating the present
Dean Conant Worcester (1866-1924) was a man nationalist Philippine history taught me to hate. Worcester felt alluded to in a blind item “Aves de rapiña” (Birds of Prey), in the Halloween 1908 issue of “El Renacimiento.” He sued for libel and won. The newspaper was forced to close, and the writer (Fidel Reyes), editor (Teodoro M. Kalaw), and publisher (Martin Ocampo), were found guilty and sentenced to jail time that was not served, pending appeal, until they were pardoned by United States Governor General Francis Burton Harrison in 1914.
Most people do not know that Worcester did field research in the Philippines in 1887, as a zoology undergraduate at the University of Michigan. He was interested in Philippine birds long before he was appointed a member of the first and second Philippine Commission, as well as serving as interior secretary (1901-1913). When he stepped down from the government, he reinvented himself as an entrepreneur using his Philippine knowledge and connections for success. His publications are available online for free, the most famous being the two-volume “The Philippines: Past and Present” (1914). His texts are supplemented by over 10,000 photographs he collected, now available online from the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.
Hidden under his shadow are the writings of his wife, Nanon Fay Worcester, who accompanied Dean Worcester on his inspection trip to the Cordilleras in 1903 and 1909. Her diary, actually a compilation of letters to her mother, describes what she saw and experienced in 1909. Since Philippine history is largely written by men, based on documents by men, it is a treat to come across a primary source from a feminine viewpoint.
While Dean Worcester’s gaze was on wildlife and understanding “non-Christian tribes” for US governance, Nanon Fay’s preoccupation was with travel and the domestic side of life. She contrasted times when meals were served on china, with proper napkins and tablecloth, with times they used enameled tin plates, and their camping kit utensils. As mentioned in the last column, the Worcester 60-man Cordilleras expedition was impressive, with 30 mounted men or on horses and 30 cargadores! She recorded distances not in miles but by the time it took to get from one town to another on horseback. She described pathways depending on difficulty and incline. She worried about narrow trails with a mountain on one side and a deep ravine on another. They crossed rivers on horseback when the current was not strong. In 1903 they were ferried across rivers in a box suspended by ropes. Reading Worcester made me appreciate the traffic and little inconveniences of Kennon Road and the Palispis-Aspiras Highway to and from Baguio.
Nanon Fay’s natural curiosity provides ethnographic data for historians and anthropologists. In places where American education had made a foothold, the party was serenaded by schoolchildren singing English songs. In Atok, they were called over:
“… to listen to the Igorots singing. It was the same thing we hear all through his country. One native begins and tells his story and all join in on the chorus. Last night they were telling how glad they were to have us here, how sorry they were not to have a better house for us to stay in, and how sorry they were not to know better how to entertain us, etc. They sang at length, too, on how much more prosperous they are now than they were in Spanish times. They were all sitting on their heels under a house with their little fires of pitch and their jar of ‘tapuy’ handy. It is needless to say that they were all, more or less, happy.”
She depicted the rice terraces as “old-fashioned crazy quilts.” Adding that “even the fancy stitches are represented by the stone walls that separate paddies and hold up terraces.” And the beauty of the landscape, with growing rice stalks green and straight as arrows, was not just visual but also acoustic. When stillness was broken by bird-scaring devices described as follows:
“Every paddy was covered with a network of rattan, or something of that sort, and the whole thing connected with a string which ran down to the river. On the end of this string is a canoe-shaped piece of wood which fills with water and is carried a ways downstream and then empties and flies back, which motion pulls all the strings across the paddy. Somewhere in the paddy and connected with the net of rope, there is always a bamboo pile at the top of which is a frame, from which hang suspended a half dozen or more pieces of bamboo which swing out from the frame and flap back with every movement of the net, making a great clacking noise which is heard all through the valley.”
Two other devices of bamboo are documented in words rather than pictures: one activated by wind, and another by a string pulled by the women or children watching the rice fields from a distance. Are these devices obsolete with motion-activated alarms and CCTV? Reading primary-source ethnographies is not about an obsolete past, but a continuing present.
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