Christmas Choreography and other Subaltern Responses to Religious Hegemony in the Philippines

The Christmas season in the Philippines is the longest in the world, and purportedly the happiest—this happiness, however, can be weaponized. The elites in the Philippines (politicians, warlords, and the like) have engineered a “culture of giving” in Christmas that serves to entrench their position as the “givers” above the masses. However, a CNN profile that extols the jolly times in Filipino Christmas decided to have a somewhat sobering epilogue about how the victims of a recent typhoon often “relied on Catholic charities to provide them with some Christmas spirit”. That “spirit”, of course, often implies a strong material support in there, which has led me to question the role that the masses have played in either perpetuating or resisting this “culture of giving”. I will investigate the ways in which the poor classes negotiate their role as “receivers” in this culture of giving during the season. Since relying only on the news inevitably skews attention to the elites, I plan on filing through social media, YouTube, and other popular forms of media as well to find more authentic voices of resistance, in whatever form. This paper could also find some interesting insights on how the colonial development of Christmas in the Philippines connect to such a “post”-colonial society.

Potential References:

ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (1983)

Florentino Hornedo, The Favor of the Gods: Essays in Filipino Religious Thought and Behavior (2001)

Vicente Rafael. White Love and other Events in Filipino History (2000)

Rudnyckyj, Daromir. “Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 24(1) (2009): 104-141.

James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985)

Cristina Evangelista Torres, The Americanization of Manila, 1898-1921 (2010)

Katharine Wiegele, Investing in Miracles: El Shaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines (2005)