ART AS CULTURAL SYSTEM:

A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF VISAYAN INDIGENOUS AESTHETICS

Erlinda K. Alburo, Ph.D.

Cebuano Studies Center, University of San Carlos

This paper uses the central concept of art as cultural system, which
locates the capacity to perceive meaning in art within a collective experience
and finds the central connection between art and collective life on a semiotic
plane. The paper will look first at some theories in general Filipino aesthetics
before focusing on Visayan aesthetics.

Some Concepts and Definitions

Art may be seen as the expression of the human spirit that imposes
some order on material that is subject to sense perception, and the term also
refers to both the expressive skill and the product of such skill. Culture has
been defined in many ways, but here we shall look at it as the web of
significance that man has spun around himself. When the terms art and
culture are joined in a phrase, the immediate meaning that comes to mind is
an elitist one: a cultured person is one who is knowledgeable in the fine arts.
The more common meaning for anthropologists is a functionalist one, which
looks at how art works define social relationships, as in the giving of dowry;
how they sustain social rules, as in the use of distinct objects by an insider
and an outsider; or how they strengthen social values, as in group
performance in song or dance.

Without underplaying the functionalist meaning, we propose an approach

that is a semiotic one. (Semiotics is “the academic study of the relationship
of language and other signs to their meanings,” in Collins Dictionary 1995).
The semiotic approach believes that the meaning of art is perceived by
members of a cultural community as members of that community, and such
meaning is generated by actual use or lived experience. Meaning, in other
words, is not learned artificially like in the classroom, where we study
perspective and rhythm of lines and shapes. According to Geertz, semiotics
“must move beyond the consideration of signs as a means of
communication” or as “a code to be deciphered” to a consideration of these
signs as modes of thought and idiom to be interpreted, a science “that can
determine the meanings of things for the life that surrounds them.” (Geertz
1983: 120) In such a view then, the content, form and style of art works –
and I include here the utilitarian arts like pottery, weaving, basketry,
weaponry and other crafts – will reflect and construct the structures of
cognition and modes of feeling of a culture.

A last word Is aesthetics, which is defined by the dictionary (Collins 1995) as

“a branch of philosophy concerned with the study of the concepts of beauty."
In studying indigenous aesthetics, such concepts of beauty will include
particular forms and styles that the people themselves consider as worthy of
praise and giving them delight. A good way, which may not be the only way,
of determining how the people themselves see beauty is by way of their
language.

Some Related Studies

One of the postcolonial efforts in academe today is the retrieval of the

indigenous, and this is seen in an unprecedented interest in indigenous
psychology, history as seen from below, and adaptation of folk literary forms.
Towards the end of rewriting the traditional and canonical Western-based
accounts in these various fields, researchers have tried to reconstruct
indigenous categories. In the field of art, this is done with a sociological
approach in order “to understand a culture’s art production in that culture’s
own term.” (Silver 1979: 294). And as early as 1955, Boas stressed the need
of a balanced appreciation of material, technical, and psychological factors
to a proper understanding of how art styles develop and how their meanings
can best be interpreted. (Boas 1955: 146).

Western anthropologists themselves have fought for art within the

cultural domain, criticizing the imposition of Western categories on the
practices of other peoples (see, for example, Price 1989), as well as the
commercial exploitation of cultural minorities. An example of the latter is
Fred Myers who wrote on the representation of the culture of Australian
aboriginals through acrylic paintings on display in exhibits (Myers 1992).
Myers interprets the meanings of the artworks for the aboriginals themselves
as not having undergone change but as being added to; such meanings
include painting as a source of income, painting as a source of cultural
respect, painting as a meaningful activity defined by its relationship to
indigenous values (in the context of ‘self-determination’), and also painting
as an assertion of personal/ socio-political identity expressed in rights to
place. (p. 327)

I am not aware of a similar study in the Philippine setting, although

nationalist art commentators are not lacking in decrying the exploitation of
folk and ethnic arts here for their saleable qualities (see, for example,
Guillermo 1988). We wonder what the indigenous peoples themselves think,
do they feel they are prostituting their art, which is stripped of their meaning
as cultural expression? What is their attitude towards tourists or
anthropology students who pay them to perform a ritual, or towards
government-sponsored festivals at which they are invited to participate?

Now, for works that like our project at hand also look at language as source
for the study of aesthetics in the Philippines, there are two. One is an
important book by William Henry Scott, Barangay: Sixteenth-Century
Philippine Culture and Society (1994); the other is Jonathan Malicsi’s article
“On the Sambal Ayta Concept of Beauty” (1996). Scott’s scholarship has
gifted us with ethnography of the past as documented in language as
mediated however by Spanish missionaries, but the book, which makes
extensive use of Alcina, gives us a good idea of how the ancient peoples of
these islands lived, especially the Visayans. Scott catalogued the terms they
actually used as culled from early dictionaries in Spanish. However, because
of the period studied, it falls somewhat short of our present enterprise,
limiting our view to a way of life that on the whole has changed considerably.
One can still use his data in a reconstruction of indigenous aesthetics. In fact,
I have used the same sources he did.

In the other study, Malicsi focuses on the concept of physical beauty rather
than the arts. However, it provides us with a good model of how to look for
coherences and correspondences in estimations of beautiful movement,
beautiful form and beautiful attire. One interesting, though not pioneering,
finding here is that the terms describing the physical are accompanied by
emotional meanings, like the terms for ugly, which is associated with the
pitiful and the fearful. A review of the meanings for such qualities against a
larger ethnography or history of the Sambal Ayta, I’m sure, would reveal how
such meanings must have conflated as a result perhaps of the dislocation of
the people. But Malicsi’s main finding deals with the use of neutral terms
which, he judges, may be due to the Sambal Ayta’s “not-so-discriminating
outlook, their limited experiences, or their avoidance of conflict with their
fellowmen for fear of retribution”. I have some reservations on this, though,
for I believe outlook cannot be judged as naïve or sophisticated from the
viewpoint of the people studied.

Filipinos who have themselves studied the indigenous aesthetics are

agreed on the following characteristics of Filipino art in its many forms: a) the
lack of boundaries, b) the love of ornament, c) spontaneity as equivalent to
originality; and d) in its verbal form, this art also manifests a preference for
indirection.

We can cite at least three local art critics who have written on it. One is
Rodrigo Perez III whose essay on the baroque is well-known (Perez 1962).
Perez concludes that “for all its apparent inconsistencies, its careless,
composite, hybrid nature, its unabashed receptivity to change, Filipino taste
can be summed up in one word: Baroque.” (p. 261) For want of an
indigenous term, baroque will have to serve to describe such qualities as
variety and fear of open space not just in our art works, but as a general way
of life, not just in reference to style but to an attitude or obsession, as the
author calls it, as he churns out example after example like the jeepney, the
ice-cream cart, the church pulpit, the fiesta, the barong tagalog. To the
average Filipino, creativity is equated more with indiscriminate accumulation
rather than with the selection and control underlying much of Western art (p.
262). Perez’ interest for us lies in the way he rationalizes our love for
ornamentation, which is also shared by the other two Filipino scholars.
According to him, it is our environment with its promise of perpetual summer
that has conditioned such a taste which he sums up as “What is rich is
beautiful.” I’m afraid, given the degradation of our present natural
environment, such an explanation may not hold true given another century.
By that time, perhaps the resulting baldness of our mountains may condition
us to a taste for “What is barren is beautiful”.

A second writer on Filipino aesthetics is Felipe de Leon Jr., who uses the
phrase people’s art (De Leon 1990). As opposed to specialist art, people’s art
includes such nomenclatures as traditional, indigenous, ethnic and folk art.
What are the characteristics of such a people’s art? De Leon, whose main
preoccupation are the entertainment arts, gives seven such characteristics:
its integration in everyday life and not regarded as a separate activity; its
cultivation together with other human values and not as an end in itself; its
creation, performance or presentation, and experience not the exclusive
preserve of a few specialists but one of collective participation; an emphasis
on the process of artistic creation than on the finished product; the non-use
(unlike in the West) of artificial technical, material, and formal barriers
around the concept of art; and the lack of necessary connection between the
creation, presentation and experience of art and on the other, tremendous
materials and costs (pp. 317-318). As examples of the unity of such art, De
Leon cites the balitao of Cebu, the pandangguhan of Batangas, the awitan of
Quezon, the pagsindi of Sulu and the berso and maskota of Cagayan, among
others (p. 319). What these various performance arts share is the
combination of poetry, music and dance woven into one.

According to De Leon, such arts are called bio-degradable art, and the
concept of an art critic – who is an outsider – has no place in an artistic
activity where everybody is a participant (p. 321). The hoarding instinct of
art collectors would not apply here, since the taste is for the ephemeral, an
advantage in a people’s culture “since it encourages the continuous creation
of art rather than preservation and worship”, and therefore a sign of
confidence that we can reproduce the same any time (ibid).

Lastly, we cite Alice Guillermo, who has written a lot on Filipino

aesthetics (Guillermo 1986). On the whole, Guillermo agrees with both Perez
and De Leon in their main ideas. More oriented to the study of formal
properties, her article focuses on such principles of composition the use of
space, line and shape, and color. The Filipino artist, she observes, tends to
cover an entire surface with design motifs; chooses curvilinear line and
shape, which is expressive of the lush environment, an emotional
spontaneity, and an outgoing orientation in the Filipino; and prefers bright
and vivid colors, which express a certain vitality of life and a warm and
romantic temperament (pp. 53-56). Along with these broad observations,
Guillermo distinguishes styles of the North from those elsewhere, saying that
the Cordillera peoples display a geometric style, with monotonous or narrow
coastal strips that suggest more arduous conditions of existence. (p. 56)

The quality of shallowness or superficiality in Filipino art is attributed

by Guillermo, in an attempt at involving social formation in the evolution of
Filipino aesthetics, to the influence of Western colonization; she says that the
Filipinos adopted the externals of the dominant colonizing cultures. This
shallowness is also seen as a strategy by Sally Ness, who studied the sinulog
of Cebu (Ness 1992). In describing the speaking style of the Cebuano
Visayan, Ness says that shallowness (salingkapaw in Cebuano) is a precious
asset in the Cebuano’s environment: “A ‘well-grounded’ argument (which, in
this context, could as easily mean a free-floating one as a heavily anchored
one) need not necessarily stand firm when tested.” (p. 47)

A more recent work would explain in cultural terms the phenomenon of

verbal ambiguity (referred to in one of the sets described later, that of
indirection). Such ambiguity is a natural poetic quality that got lost when
literature was made to serve religion during the Spanish colonial period but
which has been retained in everyday speech. Maggay writes that indirection
is “a function of the very high degree of complexity and elaborateness in
Filipino social relations” and that it is “a rich, delicate, and intricate
expressiveness born out of a culture whose social grammar and vocabulary
is subtly and infinitely nuanced.” (Maggay 1999: 19).

Sources of the Study

In an attempt to retrieve such indigenous aesthetics the paper presents

categories that emerge while examining the lexicons of Cebuano,
Hiligaynon and Waray. The lexical data have been extracted from some
dictionaries and other sources, the earliest of which is from the 17 th century,
until the present. Necessarily loanwords from both Spanish and English are
excluded. The modern lexicons abound with such loanwords, as well as with
compounds or coinages in referring to borrowed concepts (sugilambong for
novel, gumalaysay for essay, etc.). The necessity of inventing or borrowing
vocabulary with which to talk about art leads us to conclude that the
indigenous peoples don’t or didn’t talk about art the way the modern
observer talks about it, which is in terms for example of genres and
categories relating to formal properties and stylistic features.

References to such qualities in the people’s lexicon are more often than not
derived from observations of their environment and the concrete world,
rather than in terms of abstractions. Visayans, for example, would refer to
“literary skill” with the term dagang, the quill used for writing. Thus, their
vocabulary for art is filled with figurative similes, metaphors and
metonymies. Of course, there are some abstract terms like alampat and
diyandi, both meaning “art”, but no Cebuano below 60 today knows or uses
either word. Instead they speak of arte.

To show the coherence of the cultural system of art, the terms have
been culled from areas that are integrated in the local mind but which in the
West are discrete. These areas are general evaluation of art, architecture,
ceramics, clothing, crafts, decorative arts, entertainment arts – which include
music and dance -- , language and communication arts, literature and visual
arts. Indeed, since I started grouping the terms according to these areas,
I’ve had to do a lot of cross-referencing because approximately half of these
terms were used simultaneously in two or three areas.

The linguistic data used in the present study were extracted from 250
pages of vocabulary items from dictionaries and language texts. These do
not claim to be exhaustive, but as far as six years of gathering can go, we
can say that they comprise a respectable body of material for our purpose.
My study, of which this is only a start, makes use of two sets of linguistic
data. One set is made up of vocabulary entries grouped according to how
they collectively suggest a unit, a quality or feeling or mode of thought. The
first set is also limited to Cebuano Visayan and to the areas of entertainment
and language arts. The other set is comprised of selected terms from the
three major Visayan languages which are shared by at least three of the
different areas in art. In both sets, the underlined letters refer to the sources,
mostly dictionaries (a guide to which is found at the end of this paper).

Preliminary Findings on the Visayan Lexicon

I have six groupings of related concepts that point to the dominant

qualities, but only in Cebuano (see App. I). These qualities serve to
corroborate the earlier studies of Perez, De Leon and Guillermo, and suggest
a similar coherence in the larger cultural system of the Philippines. These
are: informality of performance/ indefiniteness of performers/ involvement of
audience/ lack of fixed sequence or of boundaries (with 6 entries); love of
amusement/ animation/ games/ humor/ making fun (28 entries); love of vivid
color/ ornamentation (excluding the many terms related to jewelry and
grooming)/ sense of horror vacui (36 entries); a preference for group
performance, including competition (12 entries); a preference for, or device
of, indirection (11 entries); and the skill of improvisation/ making adjustment/
spontaneity (8 entries).

I have neither the leisure nor energy to go through all of these, but for
illustration, let’s go briefly through the shortest of the six groupings in the
first set, which suggest the informality of performance and involvement of
the audience. The respective sources of these entries will tell us how old the
term is and very roughly the period when they were introduced or used. Ilis,
which is a general term meaning “to change” as in ilis sinina or “to change
clothing”, and its synonym salili, suggest that it’s considered natural and
even practical to change partners not only in dancing, but also in other
performances like singing, playing and even work. Karahay, which alludes to
cutting in a dance, is a more modern word applicable on occasions of
ballroom dancing introduced during the American period, with the active
partner who expresses the intention of cutting in being the male. The next
two terms still refer to dancing: kudutay or kudutsa, showing audience
participation in dance competitions very early in the Spanish period; and
lanat, another term related to dance competitions. The last two terms tell us
something of the conventions in verbal interaction of Cebuanos: palusut and
sal-ak, both meaning “butting in on a conversation”, do not carry negative
connotations but are tolerated especially if the remark happens to be witty
and entertaining.

The second set contains terms from Cebuano, Hiligaynon (H) and
Waray (W) which are used simultaneously in at least three fields of art (too
long to include here, with 25 pages in font 10). We can look at three of these
terms that would illustrate the coherence in the cultural system. The
abbreviations in bold face are: ART – General; CLO – Clothing and
Accessories; CRA – Crafts; DEC – Decorative Arts; ENT – Entertainment Arts;
LAN – Language & Communication Arts; LIT – Literary Arts; and VIS – Visual
Arts.

Bagay ART- harmony, symmetry, Kau,Her, manner, method, kind, class, way,
melodiousness; tuned, harmonious, fit, proper, suitable, adapted, Kau;
concord, proportion; harmonious, = angay, Her, befitting, becoming, Wo
(binagay-bagay to reconcile contradictions, bring about peace and
friendship, restore order, Kau). ENT - to unify or standardize voices or
musical roles, compare one with another, dlE, tune an instrument, dlE,INL, =
angay, INL; for instruments to be in tune, Wo; dance, the music and song of
which are languorous and melancholic, by a couple dancing and mingling
their motions with cries, Goq. (binagay-bagay [H] to tune, harmonize,
arrange harmoniously, Kau). LIT - to stimulate, animate another by telling
allegories, make innuendoes, sing or recite enigmatic couplets or verses, dlE,
animate, sing verses, Raf (binagay nga sinulat rhyme; pamagay poetry, Enr,
rhyme, Vi