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DOI: 10.7330/9780874218992.c03 3 Vernacular Authority Critically Engaging “Tradition” Robert Glenn Howard Introduction: Vernacular Authority in Everyday Conversation At a wedding reception I once attended, a banquet-style midday dinner of steaks, potatoes, and more traditional Filipino dishes gave way to wine, mahjong, and conversation. “Joan,” recounted stories of her childhood in the rural Philippines.1 She described her “Auntie Loling” who had a “spirit friend.” Joan’s animated storytelling had commanded the attention of most of the players at the mahjong table when her daughter asked her: “How did [the spirit] exist? Did it used to be human before?” Joan responded to the whole group, booming in her typically authoritative tone: They call it “espiritista!” In Filipino folklore there are good fairies and the bad fairies . . . The good spirit will befriend you, will give you a good harvest on your farm or will give wild pigs for dinner meat . . . [But] the bad spirit will possess you and later you go crazy. (Joan 1994a) In her response, Joan referred to “folklore” as an authorizing force in her assertion that Filipino sorcery is real. Later she made it clear that this folklore was a source of power alternate to any offered by the dominant institution in her family’s public life at that time: the Catholic Church. Joan recounted how her Auntie Loling worked with a spirit friend to help find a significant sum of money that had disappeared. Based on the 1 The names of the respondents have been changed to protect their identities. Vernacular Authority 73 spirit’s advice, Loling sent relatives to retrieve the cash. When the excited group returned to the house to report their success, Joan and her mother happened to be there, sharing a cup of coffee with the local priest who had unexpectedly dropped by for a visit. Joan smiled as she relished the memory of his disapproval: “My mom invited him [in] for coffee—so the priest was there. And the priest was just shaking his head. Because he said, ya know, ‘that’s the work of the spirits.’” (Joan 1994b) As both a Filipino immigrant to the United States and a devout Catholic, Joan’s recounted experiences become expressions of a specifically Filipino traditional authority that stands alongside but apart from the institutional authority of the Catholic Church. As such, Joan’s everyday storytelling points to an important tension in the concept of tradition. On the one hand, tradition can refer to the empirical quality of an act as having been handed down, while on the other hand, it can refer to a noninstitutional or vernacular authorizing force perceived by those participating in an act. The empirical sense of “tradition” comes into sharp focus when folklore studies are imagined in terms of a “science of tradition.” Here, calling something traditional is the empirically verifiable claim that a specific component of expressive culture has continuities and consistencies through space and time (Georges and Jones 1995). Because empiricism is a term for the broad idea that scientific knowledge must be based on the replicability of evidentiary experiences through observation or under the controlled conditions of experiments, the published documentation of cognate forms of Filipino sorcery starting in the sixteenth century empirically verifies that Joan’s beliefs are traditional (Cale 1973, 112; Fansler 1965, 214–17; Lieban 1967, 20–21; Pajo 1954, 110–14). In this sense, Joan’s “folklore” has the quality of being handed down over several hundred years at least. On a strictly etic or analytic level, an external expert can document, classify, and verify that quality in her stories. The sense of tradition as an authorizing force, however, is more sharply in focus when researchers approach folklore as performed expressive behavior or “discourse.” Approached as discourse, the quality of being traditional is a perception among participants that their action is the result of social connections that have endured through space and across time. Focusing on Joan’s deployment of the term folklore, we can see this second sense of tradition operating. For Joan, the use of the word folklore asserts that there are continuities and consistencies that she asks her audience to accept as evidence of the reality of Filipino spirits. In subsequent interviews, Joan Vernacular Authority 74 proudly recounted many tales of her youth in the rural Philippines featuring her powerful aunt using a male spirit to subvert husbands and thieves—as well as priests. Spending time with Joan and her family, I garnered a richer sense of...

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