Books by Macario Lacbawan
The notion of indigeneity in the Philippines is politically fraught. Most who live on the archipe... more The notion of indigeneity in the Philippines is politically fraught. Most who live on the archipelago are descendants of aboriginal peoples, whether they claim tribal affiliation or not, and those who do enact traditional identities share little else in common. As a result, the term “indigenous” remains unstable and malleable seventy-five years after independence. Connecting insights from Tillian and Foucauldian social theory, Regimes of Contention illuminates how the ever-changing Philippine state, from the 1970s through today, constructs artificial subjectivities that Indigenous peoples must embody to access ancestral resources held by the federal government. What emerges is a lucid illustration of how governmentality is entangled with indigeneity in the Philippines.
Papers by Macario Lacbawan
Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskaps-Samfundet i Uppsala: Årsbok 2023-2024, 2025
Asia-pacific Social Science Review, 2016
The key to understanding any social phenomenon is to follow how actors tread the social landscape... more The key to understanding any social phenomenon is to follow how actors tread the social landscape and describe how they form groups, fuse meanings, and create associations with different frames. In this paper, I employ Bruno Latour’s reconceptualization of assemblage to trace how NGOs and other actors create assemblages by fusing or defusing dog-eating with discourses on dirt, epidemic, and human rights. More specifically, NGOs such as LinisGobyerno and Animal Kingdom Foundation (AKF) produce assemblages that align dog-eating with sanitation, violence, and epidemic. Conversely, supporters of the practice try to invert these claims by foregrounding dog-meat consumption as an entitlement that is protected by both local and international legal codes. This paper also engages with previous attempts to analyze dog-eating and their failure to deal with the quotidian ways in which actors bundle the practice with multiple frames. Rather than presupposing how peoples’ discursive understanding...
Studia ethnologica Croatica, 2015
The turn to performativity in the social sciences has spawned a new wave of scholarship that cons... more The turn to performativity in the social sciences has spawned a new wave of scholarship that considers tourism as a performative process. However, the manner through which scholars understand tourism as performative drama is limiting. A fundamental critique of dramaturgy stems from its inability to account for performance as a chain of emergent social processes. Using the case of free walking tours in Budapest, Hungary, we argue that treating tourism as a performance is an act of fusion that culls its technique by deploying dominant cultural codes, materiality and humor. Performance hinges on an attempt to fuse various elements in a dramatic presentation. These elements include the (1) unsettling presence of the audience's feedback, (2) the lingering memory of previous performances, (3) the deployment of cultural codes, (4) the mundanity of the material means of symbolic presentation, and (5) the use of linguistic play through humor. We conclude this essay by elaborating other dimensions that could possibly open up more discussions on tourism as a performative phenomenon.
The key to understanding any social phenomenon is to follow how actors tread the social landscape... more The key to understanding any social phenomenon is to follow how actors tread the social landscape and describe how they form groups, fuse meanings, and create associations with different frames. In this paper, I employ Bruno Latour's reconceptualization of assemblage to trace how NGOs and other actors create assemblages by fusing or defusing dog-eating with discourses on dirt, epidemic, and human rights. More specifically, NGOs such as LinisGobyerno and Animal Kingdom Foundation (AKF) produce assemblages that align dog-eating with sanitation, violence, and epidemic. Conversely, supporters of the practice try to invert these claims by foregrounding dog-meat consumption as an entitlement that is protected by both local and international legal codes. This paper also engages with previous attempts to analyze dog-eating and their failure to deal with the quotidian ways in which actors bundle the practice with multiple frames. Rather than presupposing how peoples' discursive understanding of food as inflections of deep binary-oppositions, or an epiphenomenon of productive forces, I opine that we must refocus on how actors themselves interpret contentious food practices by following their action in a flattened social world.
This paper explores how dog-meat consumption in the Philippines serves as an empty icon for varie... more This paper explores how dog-meat consumption in the Philippines serves as an empty icon for varied social discourses. By utilizing structural hermeneutics of the Strong Program and Ernesto Laclau's concept of empty signification, this research locates dog and dog eating as empty signifiers that function as a battleground for competing discourses about Philippine identity, tradition and culture. The debate, however diverse, is informed by a cultural code that positions dog eating in a polarized image as a 1) pollutant of legal system or marker of basic rights, and 2) symptom of past culture or signifier of 'authentic' contemporary Filipino identity. This paper also notes how binary codes could work as an analytic tool that is socially contingent and free-floating.
Book Reviews by Macario Lacbawan
Conference Presentations by Macario Lacbawan
In his book Disciple and Punish (1995), philosopher Michel Foucault remarks about the growing sha... more In his book Disciple and Punish (1995), philosopher Michel Foucault remarks about the growing shame in the deployment of punishment by the state. This shame emanates from the transformation of a sovereign rule, which traditionally relied on torture and execution, into an entity that allows for the propagation of life. How is this new form of power acted out in indigenous spaces? And how does this new power configuration tap into the cultural force of affect? This paper describes how shame is entangled with state authority as a new control mechanism governing indigenous lands in frontier spaces. Based on year-long ethnographic research among the Ikalahan indigenous communities in Northern Philippines, I trace how the Ikalahan notion of bain (shame) became instrumentalized by the Philippine state and the Ikalahan communities to allocate blame and culpability for actions that violated environmental policies. I also describe how legal recognition of indigenous land rights did not automatically translate into political autonomy, where indigenous communities could possess the authority to govern their resources. Instead, by speaking through the lexicon of affect, the Philippine state still managed to define how tribal communities should relate to their lands according to dominant environmental norms and contemporary ecological anxieties.
In this paper, I discuss how the recent promulgation of the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act (IPRA)... more In this paper, I discuss how the recent promulgation of the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act (IPRA) by the Philippine government is an increasing attempt to governmentalize indigenous life and resources. I argue that while the formalization of the customary resource allocation as a pivotal instrument to realize an equitable and just life for minorities ushers a new opportunity for indigenous peoples' rights, the IPRA's unbending definition of what constitutes a customary system and the ensuing biopolitics of legal subjectivity expected of tribal communities impute a precarious condition. Using two cases of indigenous clans with existing applications to acquire a land title, I present how the IPRA forces tribal minorities to build their land claims according to what it strictly defines as an indigenous resource and a proper customary practice on land ownership even when such definitions imagine an idealized subject position and a fetishized tenure relationship. I end this discussion with a reflection about the need to be suspicious of claims about buen vivir and the empowerment of indigenous communities to life by affording them legal rights to acquire and use their tribal resources. With the cases under study, I present how the state's official project to care for the well-being of its indigenous population may spiral into a precarious form of life as it imposes new external regimes of resource use and indigenous subjectivities for tribal minorities to fulfill. *** Redeeming alterity: recognition and the new turn The history of state formation is the history of defining and imposing a specific understanding of what constitutes a veritable well-being and good life for citizens. Its consolidation, as Michel Foucault so famously opines, is a biopolitical biography, taking turns from religious paternalism-mostly Catholic-until the descend of political-economy of care into modern society 2. In the postcolony, this history has taken a more vicious form as the colonial experiment saw the direct importation of a predominantly Western mode of living deeply steeped within a phallocentric Christian epistemology. The colonial period, then, is strategically domesticated through the inculcation of the white masks over the black and brown skins, to paraphrase Franz Fanon's iconic conceptualization of colonialism's violent denial of other ways of existence except those that emanate from the triumvirate of Christianity, colonial state, and monarchial rule 3. The independent state, which emerged out of the anti-colonial war, has taken over the project of charting the contour of an independent life from colonial domination by ironically resting its foundation on the same pillars of oppression that saw the easy entry of colonialism into the Global South. New and emerging modern states may have displaced the colonial master from the seats of power but they continued to speak
Macario Lacbawan SFB 1095, Goethe University Frankfurt The expansion of the New People's Army (NP... more Macario Lacbawan SFB 1095, Goethe University Frankfurt The expansion of the New People's Army (NPA) into the Cordillera highlands of Northern Philippines in the 1970s has imputed an interesting illustration of how the production of a revolutionary subjectivity has been accomplished by recasting the character of tribal sociality according to NPA's rereading of Maoist-Leninist thoughts. What are the points of contestation between NPA's appeal to communism and the traditionally subsistent and isolated economic production of minorities? How has the NPA dealt with the absence of peasantry and industrial workers among Cordillera's tribal communities as a fulcrum for producing its revolutionary subject? In this paper, I trace how Philippines' brand of militant left has grounded their production of a militant subjectivity among Cordillera's tribal communities by (1) recoding the nature of indigenous resources and autochthonous social hierarchy based on a peculiar marriage of nationalist and communist ideology and (2) an outright denial of all subject positions except for the peasantry and the proletariat. Official party documents of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and interviews with former NPA rebels are analyzed to describe how the incipient stage of NPA's growth in the tribal north has unfolded. Towards the end of this presentation, I reflect on how the forced production of a socialist subject has debilitated NPA's ability to confront issues of indigenous communities without appealing to class.
The recognition of indigenous land rights through the Indigenous Peoples' Right Act (IPRA) has re... more The recognition of indigenous land rights through the Indigenous Peoples' Right Act (IPRA) has resulted in unintended consequences. A notable example of which includes the participation of violent non-state actors as brokers in the application for a Certificate of Ancestral Land Title (CALT) or as hired security personnel guarding indigenous lands. How do we explain the peculiar configuration of relationship between violent non-state groups and the realization of indigenous land rights? What does this relationship tell us about the deployment of indigenous rights in the Philippines? Using one case of an awarded CALT to an Ibaloi clan in Baguio City over a government-owned dairy farm, I describe how the enactment of indigenous rights provides a space of encounter where right holders tap into the networks of private militias for financial brokerage and security. At the end of this paper, I reflect on the paradoxical entanglement of how the claim to a legal normativity using violent non-state groups is reflective of how right as a form of practice tends to blur the seemingly naturalized boundaries between " civil and political society " (Chatterjee 2004).
Rhetoric of victimhood bedecks any forms of violent confrontation. Rebel groups or secessionist m... more Rhetoric of victimhood bedecks any forms of violent confrontation. Rebel groups or secessionist movements, for instance, couch their claims by invoking traumatic events in the past that could illustrate how their “enemy” has committed wrong to their community. This rhetoric is then utilized to galvanize calls for collective resistance and create a way to seek redress from their perceived antagonists. Yet, the depiction of an event as a source of collective victimhood goes beyond individual pain and suffering. To transform the death of one person or the “massacre” of a particular group as a collective suffering involves a cultural production that weaves diverse elements into coherent normative assemblages of pain. Kenneth Burke’s victimage ritual has succinctly illuminated how the formation of victimhood is constructed through rhetorical devices. However, in this paper, I reconsider his work as a starting point for a cultural sociology of victimhood. I argue that the symbolic construction of victimhood also involves the deployment of cultural codes that are deeply informed by binarism, in Durkheimian sense. The Strong Program of Cultural Sociology recognizes that binary oppositions occupy an essential function in how actors deal with events that leave indelible mark in the collective consciousness. Hence, creating collectivized victimhood through rhetorical and performative resources is deeply truncated by binarism. To illustrate my claim, I revisit the Mamasapano clash and describe how the death of 44 soldiers is made into a narrative of victimhood informed by a script populated by “sneaky enemies” vs “innocent martyrs” or the “violent rebels” vs “heroes”.
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Books by Macario Lacbawan
Papers by Macario Lacbawan
Book Reviews by Macario Lacbawan
Conference Presentations by Macario Lacbawan