Tulong: An Articulation of Politics in Christian Philippines by Soon Chuan Yean (review)

The author, Soon Chuan Yean, is a Malaysian political scientist based at the Universiti Sains Malaysia with research interests in local and cultural politics “from below” in Malaysia and the Philippines. The book grew out of his doctoral thesis submitted to the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Because Soon was supervised by the eminent Filipino historian Reynaldo Ileto, the book is arguably yet another elaboration of the long-standing concerns of his mentor.

In 2001 Ileto had thrown down the gauntlet at scholars imbibing an Orientalist mode of interpreting and representing Philippine politics. With the scholarship of the influential American political scientist Carl Lande serving as the paradigmatic example, Ileto (“Orientalism and the Study of Philippine Politics,” Philippine Political Science Journal 2001:1–32, p. 28) observed “how a certain kind of politics, which is really never understood from within, gets to be constructed as a negative ‘other’ of the Euro-American post-Enlightenment political tradition.” By positing an impervious binary of “personal versus public” and “personal versus impersonal,” these so-called Orientalist scholars depict the “peculiar” nature of Philippine politics as an undesirable confounding of these two domains. More to the point, studies on Philippine politics and society have been stereotypically portrayed in terms of instrumentalist patron–client relationships animated by the shared cultural values of utang na loob (debt of gratitude) and hiya (shame) but deployed in an hierarchical register.

Soon’s rendition of the “everyday politics” of Barangay Angeles, a lowland settlement situated close to the shores of Lake Taal and a short distance away from the poblacion (town proper) of Tanauan City, Batangas province, is an attempt at a post-Orientialist scholarship. He argues that elites stationed at the higher echelons of a political hierarchy are not always able to shape the terms of the aforementioned relationships. Conversely, nor are the articulations of the masa (ordinary people) manifested in a monolithic or predictable fashion. To support his claims, Soon paid close attention to the reflections of his informants, made up of “clients” and lider (sub-leaders). For this purpose, Soon had to acquire a working fluency in Tagalog. He also adopted a research strategy associated more with anthropologists than with political scientists—ethnographic fieldwork. Inclusive of his language training, he spent a total of thirteen months between 2004 and 2005 in his fieldwork site.

Besides drawing his key theoretical coordinates from Ileto and Benedict Kerkvliet, Soon also appropriates the work of Filipino philosopher Fr. Leonardo N. Mercado to decipher recurring Tagalog phrases that his informants use as indicative of their worldviews “from below.” Oddly, the pioneering work of Virgilio G. Enriquez and his colleagues in the Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology) movement, which arguably shares a similar objective in decentering the use of Western epistemology in understanding Filipinos, is left out in Soon’s literature review and subsequent discussion.

The book is organized into six chapters. Three of the chapters situate the research problem theoretically while the remaining chapters—chapters 3 to 5—form the empirical spine of the book. Chapter 3 unpacks the nuances between tulong (help) and pera (money) as played out between patrons and their recipients, and chapter 4 continues in the same trajectory by turning our attention to the lexicon and politics of emotions in everyday life. Chapter 5 examines key religious idioms that undergird these meanings and expectations.

Briefly, the author maintains that expressions as espoused by the masa (ordinary people) need to be better appreciated as complex utterances that exhibit various nuanced layers of meaning. In the context of receiving tulong from political patrons, these meanings include notions of mabait (good), loob (inner being), lakaran (journey), sariling sikap (self initiative), malapit/malayo (closeness/aloofness), pagsubok (trial), pagmamalasakit (compassion), kaligtasan (salvation), and liwanag (light). Nevertheless, undergirding this melange of idioms and values are popular religious ideas stemming from Christianity, which frame the Tanauan residents’ understanding and experience of everyday politics.

Tulong thus cannot be...