Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines' Muslim South

1—Imperial Taxonomies

1 Imperial Taxonomies at the foundations of the american colonial project was a profound trust and reliance on scientific methods and scholarly theories. indeed, history itself was viewed as a quantifiable entity, which only required correct interpretation and accurate measurement to comprehend fully. To facilitate their scientific colonial endeavor, american administrators looked to the burgeoning field of ethnology. For many western imperialists, ethnological studies represented a critical field in the post-enlightenment project of universalizing and quantifying humanity via social sciences. ethnology opened an avenue of inquiry that purported to construct an inclusive narrative that both accounted for and rationalized the heterogeneity of a rapidly shrinking world. as a tool of imperialism, ethnology was “not merely a disciplined expression of a universal human curiosity, but a modern discourse that has subsumed humanity to the grand narratives and analogies of natural history.”1 key to this project was the concept of “civilization.” if ethnologists could identify concrete criteria applicable to the vast spectrum of human experience and order these criteria in an evolutionary sequence, then developmental trends could be established and the socio-scientific status of various populations deduced . anthropologists larry wolff and Marco cipolloni explain the theory as follows: “By the light of civilization, it was possible to discern a whole ordering of societies, around the globe and across the centuries: societies backward , primitive, savage, or barbarous. indeed, the very concept of civilization presupposed a condition of uncivilized origins and more-or-less-civilized stages on the path toward the ultimate occidental goal.”2 Hence, for american imperialists, ethnology represented a viable analytical field for measuring human progress—a field supported by the objectivity and transcendence of scientific law. “civilization” as an autonomously immutable force crafting the course of human development provided the ultimate validation for 27 Imperial Taxonomies the United states’ colonial endeavors. at the commencement of american rule in the Philippines, for example, President william Mckinley appealed to the omnipotent powers of civilization in almost spiritual terms to justify the country’s new imperial possession. in a speech before congress in 1899, Mckinley asked rhetorically, “Did we need their [the Filipinos’] consent to perform a great act for humanity? . . . Did we ask their consent to liberate them from spanish sovereignty . . . ? we did not ask these; we were obeying a higher moral obligation which rested on us and which did not require anybody ’s consent. we were doing our duty by them with the consent of our own consciences and with the approval of civilization [italics added].”3 By constructing a number of discursive “academic representations,” ethnologists and other colonial officials were able to establish a firm but flexible colonial discourse that underwrote the United states’ imperial project in Mindanao.4 while these officials conducted their work under the auspices of objective scientific discovery, observation, and measurement, in most cases they were looking for specific answers to particular questions. notions of imperial historicism provided ethnological studies with an already constructed organizational matrix of knowledge including irreducible categories in both social and hard sciences. in most cases, imperial taxonomies simply required colonial officials to discover ways to contextualize their findings within preexisting , acceptable, and knowable categories. This approach naturally resulted in a self-sustaining imperial discourse that allowed flexibility to scientific discovery but at the same time funneled these conclusions into an overriding narrative of universal progress. By constructing, representing, reproducing, and analyzing Moro culture and society, american imperialists were able to create a supposedly dispassionate empirical scientific standard that established and maintained the rationales and power relationships of colonial rule. nicholas Thomas explains the logic of imperial ethnological representation as follows: Depiction and documentation—through such media as colonial reports and artifact collections as well as actual painting, drawing and photography [one might also add the reproduction of native art forms such as dance and theater ]—did not merely create representations that were secondary to practices and realities, but constituted political actualities in themselves. Travelers and colonists could regard a space and another society, not as a geographic tract, nor an array of practices and relations, but as a thing depicted or described, that was immediately subject to their gaze. other peoples, cultures and cities M a k i n g M o r o s 28 could thus be subsumed to the form of a picture, and seeing a thing first as a representation and secondly as something beyond a representation created a peculiar sense of...