Papers by S. Lily Mendoza
Decolonizing Ecotheology: Indigenous and Subaltern Challenges, 2021
This study grapples with the thorny issue of what it means to recover a sense of indigeneity –an ... more This study grapples with the thorny issue of what it means to recover a sense of indigeneity –an issue rife among decolonizing diasporic Filipinos in North America who find themselves living on other peoples’ native lands, disconnected from homeland ancestral traditions (through prejudice from their mostly Christian socialization and modern subject formation), enveloped in technological urban infrastructure, and bereft of intact place-based communities where initiation and elder mentorship remain as living practice. Specifically, this problematic will be tracked within the context of a movement spearheaded by a non-profit organization called the Center for Babaylan Studies (“babaylan” being one of the terms used to refer to the healing/shamanic/spiritual tradition still extant among Philippine indigenous communities). The uniqueness of this decade-old movement (composed of academics, artists, social justice advocates, cultural workers, healing practitioners, and community activists), as compared to other progressive activist organizations among North American diasporic Filipinos that are mainly political (and anthropocentric) in orientation, is in its grounding of its decolonization work and justice vocation in the world in a mandatory recovery of a different mode of relation with living Earth as spiritual practice and as the primary way out of colonial subjection. Deeming such awareness and way of living as needing facilitation through tutelage to living indigenous elders in the homeland (and other bearers of ancestral memory in the diaspora), in addition to the conscientious re-learning of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices (IKSP) as documented in the literature (albeit often needing reading against the grain), the conundrums of doing this kind of work in a settler colonial context where the ethos’s ideological coding militates against everything signified by the term “indigenous” are both challenging and instructive.
Re-Vision, A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation, 2020
The essay keys off Vera de Chalambert’s piece, “Kali Takes America: I’m with Her” (in the afterma... more The essay keys off Vera de Chalambert’s piece, “Kali Takes America: I’m with Her” (in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election) and Leonard Cohen’s album, “You Want It Darker,” both of which name the times we live in as auguring, in mythic speech, a necessary descent to the Underworld as an initiatory rite to seeing–and being ready then, to act–clearly. Through a retrospective look at her time with the Indigenous peoples of her home country, the author argues for tutelage to those who, at this point in time, might be aptly called “Modernity’s only remaining Other.” Doing so disrupts the dominant narrative’s foreclosures around the emergency’s claim to inevitability and opens up new/old possibilities for a different kind of hope.
Just Faith: Global Responses to Planetary Urbanisation, 2018
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, Feb 8, 2017
Humanity, An Anthology, Vol. I, 2018
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2016
ABSTRACT This paper calls for a “fifth moment” in the field of intercultural communication that r... more ABSTRACT This paper calls for a “fifth moment” in the field of intercultural communication that re-examines modern culture’s values, beliefs, and assumptions about human being in the world and the role of such in fomenting today’s ongoing planetary-wide ecological crises. To conduct this re-examination, we turn to ethnoautobiography, a framework rooted in story and in the indigenous paradigm. We raise deep questions regarding the default assumptions of a discipline ensconced almost exclusively within the monocultural logic of modern culture and civilization. We end by posing key problematics that we deem crucial for renewing the discipline toward contemporary relevance, ecological awareness, and responsibility.
Communicating Ethnic and Cultural Identity, 2004
The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 2019
This essay explores the fraught relations between two historical subjects in the Philippine discu... more This essay explores the fraught relations between two historical subjects in the Philippine discursive landscape: the normative “civilized” subject of the modern nation-state and the unassimilated “primitive,” lumad/Indigenous subject located at its margins. The goal is to open up space within the Philippine public imaginary for the possibility of a different mode of relation toward the modern nation’s “others,” i.e., the estimated 14-17 million indigenous peoples within its territory, who currently face “annihilation by assimilation” and whose differing subjectivities, cultures, and lifeways seldom find just representation in the mainstream national discourse. The privileging of an indigenous perspective comes out of a decolonizing imperative, resonant in the author’s own autobiographical journeying, and the search for alternative understandings in the face of increasing questioning of the long-term viability of a now globalized modern industrial culture and civilization. Using the lens of critical intercultural communication, it engages, among others, the thesis put forward by one of the Philippines’ award-winning writers, Nick Joaquin, deemed by this writer as paradigmatic of today’s quintessential discourse on Filipino civilization and national belonging. As a critical lens, literature coming from a body of work called “anarcho-primitivism” (re-evaluating the different worth of so-called “primitive” societies) as well as material from the author’s own autobiography, is referenced as a counterpoint, presenting what is hoped to be a provocative counter-thesis to Joaquin’s (and the mainstream public’s) view.
Out of the initially uncoordinated and scattered moves to revamp theorizing within the Western-in... more Out of the initially uncoordinated and scattered moves to revamp theorizing within the Western-introduced academic disciplines in the Philippine academy, three programmatic narratives emerged from the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and history, notably, Sikolohiyang Pilipino, Pilipinolohiya, and Pantayong Pananaw, respectively. I take them here as part of a single discursive formation, each working from the same principles of valuing pagsasarili (selfdetermination) and pagtahak ng sariling landas tungo sa kabansaan (“charting an autonomous path toward nationor people-hood”). Together, they offer what appears to be the first organized, comprehensive, and programmatic challenge to the long-standing hegemony of colonial theorizing in the disciplines beginning in the period of the late 1970s and reaching a fuller maturation toward the latter half of the 1980s to the present. To date, all three discourses seem to have succeeded in attaining a certain measure of hegemony, not wi...
List of Tables Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. What Is The Japanese Permanent Employme... more List of Tables Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. What Is The Japanese Permanent Employment System? 3. Changes In The Permanent Employment System: Theoretical Argument 4. Empirical Analysis For Changes In The Permanent Employment System 5. Summary of Finding And Concluding Remarks Appendix Reference
In “Educating Savages,” intercultural communication scholar Richard Morris notes with poignancy t... more In “Educating Savages,” intercultural communication scholar Richard Morris notes with poignancy that even when Native Americans realize their “true” history, there is in such realization “a sense of curiosity, even a sense of loss, but not quite a sense of longing.” Using perspectives in critical intercultural communication, this study seeks to uncover the mechanisms of domination in the discourse of modernity that makes nativist longing all but impossible for the assimilated native. Although I find insightful Morris’ formulation of the process of modern education as a form of violent transculturation for native subjects, I argue that such phenomenon cannot be fully explained without taking into account the particular ouvre of liberal ideology that underpins much of modern thought and education. To analyze the surreptitious ways by which liberal epistemology subverts nativist desire, the study revisits the material and psychic mechanisms of the colonial process, unpacks the hidden ...
Globalizing intercultural communication, 2016
This essay maps the author’s journey out of her romance with progress and modernity into the worl... more This essay maps the author’s journey out of her romance with progress and modernity into the world of indigeneity and deep ancestry and the radicalizing impact that this shift in understanding has had on her theorizing of intercultural communication. Taking into account the urgent ecological and civilizational crises that form the context of virtually all global encounters in our present world, the question of constitutive rationalities is raised. Globalized modernity’s linear, monocultural logic of domination and limitless expansionism is examined for its impact on what now stands as modernity’s only remaining “other:” the unacculturated “primitive” or “savage,” i.e., indigenous peoples still living on the land outside the industrial infrastructure and by an entirely different ethic of relation with the earth and with others. I argue that understanding the history of relations between the two cultures is crucial to any adequate analysis of the present moment. It makes possible the apprehending of a gestalt out of the chaos of seemingly disconnected developments all portending crises in various spheres and may well stand as imperative for global survival. Rightly reading the difference in lifestyles between these two historic subjects (modern humans and indigenous peoples) ultimately poses indigenous genius as the lone historic witness to a way of being human together that was actually sustainable. On that witness may well rest the fate of the planet. The storytelling mode is employed to perform oblique theorizing with the deliberate purpose of subverting western dominance in the communicative exchange. And in keeping with the affective turn in social theory that takes subjective experience, emotive desire, bodily responses, and unconscious habituations as sites of productive reflection (cf. Brennan, 2004; Clough & Hailey, eds., 2007 and Gregg & Seigworth, eds., 2010; Negri, 1999, among others), it weaves the fabric of its story around the twin imperatives of falling in love and grieving well as as portals to transformative relations. The theoretical concerns engaged are manifold: worldview and cultural assumptions and their consequences for intercultural relations; the power of normative discourse to foreclose alternative definitions of human being; and the need to break open the limiting frame of modernity in order to envision other possible futures; among others. Embedding such in story form invites readers to the different pedagogy of being taught by grief and the patience of having to sit with a seemingly insoluble problematic.
Social Science Diliman, 2011
This essay engages the language debates in the Philippines as they play out within the politics o... more This essay engages the language debates in the Philippines as they play out within the politics of an intellectual movement in the Philippine academy called Pantayong Pananaw. Roughly translated as a “for-us, of-us, and by-us perspective,” the movement’s goal is to create the conditions for the possibility of a closed circuit of communication (the context of “us speaking among ourselves” vs. “us speaking with others”) among Filipinos deemed crucial for the democratic constitution of a national polity of speakers able to share a vision of the common good. Key to the success of this national(izing) project is the advocacy of a common medium of communication: in this case, F/Pilipino/Tagalog. In this study, I push back on Pantayong Pananaw in its singular focus on national unity and raise issue with its seeming lack of vision—if not in theory, in practice—for the role that the plural languages and cultures in the country might play in its envisioned “national community.” Cast as the in...
Undoing all forms of domination – including, in particular, religious domination – remains a cruc... more Undoing all forms of domination – including, in particular, religious domination – remains a crucial imperative of our time, given that domination constitutes a spirit-killing dynamic that distorts, oppresses and throws living beings (both human and non-human alike) out of synch with themselves. One form of domination in colonial contexts is the totalising claim to a monopoly of ‘the’ truth that effectively delegitimises and demonises all other ways of seeing the world. This essay grapples with the question: What happens when the ‘One True Story’ encounters other faith stories? Riffing off my (coedited) anthology, Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory (dedicated to the memory of the Filipino indigenous women and men healers impaled on stakes by early Spanish missionaries and left on river banks for crocodiles to feast on), I narrate my personal journey growing up as a Filipina Methodist pastor’s kid, becoming a born-again...
One of the challenges in teaching multiculturalism is the affective/emotional fallout that result... more One of the challenges in teaching multiculturalism is the affective/emotional fallout that results when undergraduate students are exposed-often for the first time-to U.S. multicultural history (beginning with the foundational trauma of native genocide since1492, the subsequent histories of slavery, immigration, the struggles around Civil Rights, and the entrenched and ongoing process of racial formation in the country). In particular, the connected histories of modern industrial culture and that of indigenous peoples around the globe present seemingly "unbridgeable cultural divides" and trigger intense and raw emotional responses that require more than just a purely cognitive approach to process effectively.
This study reports on the outcomes of a particular critical pedagogical approach to exploring questions of identity and difference in the 21st century, one intended to help facilitate movement in students' learning process beyond the stages of denial, defense, and minimization (as mapped out in intercultural communication scholar Milton Bennett's [1993] "developmental model of intercultural sensitivity"). Called "ethnoautobiography" (EA), this indigenously-grounded approach enables critical acceptance, integration, and self-transformation in the encounter with narratives from the underside of history, in many ways constituting an innovative form of intercultural pedagogy. Orchestrating a disciplined self-exploration premised on the practice of reflexivity and process-oriented integrative learning, this report on the use of EA recounts the hopeful and dynamic process of resolutely engaging historical shadow material and the healing of colonial trauma as experienced in the classroom.
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Papers by S. Lily Mendoza
This study reports on the outcomes of a particular critical pedagogical approach to exploring questions of identity and difference in the 21st century, one intended to help facilitate movement in students' learning process beyond the stages of denial, defense, and minimization (as mapped out in intercultural communication scholar Milton Bennett's [1993] "developmental model of intercultural sensitivity"). Called "ethnoautobiography" (EA), this indigenously-grounded approach enables critical acceptance, integration, and self-transformation in the encounter with narratives from the underside of history, in many ways constituting an innovative form of intercultural pedagogy. Orchestrating a disciplined self-exploration premised on the practice of reflexivity and process-oriented integrative learning, this report on the use of EA recounts the hopeful and dynamic process of resolutely engaging historical shadow material and the healing of colonial trauma as experienced in the classroom.
This study reports on the outcomes of a particular critical pedagogical approach to exploring questions of identity and difference in the 21st century, one intended to help facilitate movement in students' learning process beyond the stages of denial, defense, and minimization (as mapped out in intercultural communication scholar Milton Bennett's [1993] "developmental model of intercultural sensitivity"). Called "ethnoautobiography" (EA), this indigenously-grounded approach enables critical acceptance, integration, and self-transformation in the encounter with narratives from the underside of history, in many ways constituting an innovative form of intercultural pedagogy. Orchestrating a disciplined self-exploration premised on the practice of reflexivity and process-oriented integrative learning, this report on the use of EA recounts the hopeful and dynamic process of resolutely engaging historical shadow material and the healing of colonial trauma as experienced in the classroom.