Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados:Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (review)

The late-nineteenth century, with the Propaganda Movement and the Revolution of 1896, is arguably one of the most interrogated and intensely studied periods of Philippine history. A book that purports yet again to look at this period may seem superfluous and repetitive, but that is not so in the case of Megan C. Thomas's Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism. By examining this period from the lens of intellectual history, more specifically, the history of the knowledge produced by the ilustrados, the author provides a fresh and interesting perspective on an old, familiar topic.

In the first chapter, "Locating Orientalism and the Anthropological Sciences: The Limits of Postcolonial Critiques," the author establishes the framework of the book in conjunction with the intellectual trends and fields of knowledge that emerged in the late-nineteenth century. Starting out with a background on the state of knowledge in late-nineteenth-century Europe, particularly the ideas that came from the Orientalist standpoint, Thomas sets the stage for a discussion of Philippine intellectual developments in the same period. Orientalism as a concept and anthropology as an emergent field of science were particularly attractive and useful to Filipino scholars and intellectuals of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Common themes in Orientalism and anthropology, such as the narrative of decline and the focus on textless societies, made them especially ripe for appropriation by the Filipino intellectuals who encountered them in Europe. Methods such as philology and sources of data such as ethnology, folklore, and artefacts were also particularly apt. The result was that this group of Filipino scholars and intellectuals produced knowledge which would eventually lay the philosophical groundwork for the revolutionary movement.

The second chapter titled, "The Uses of Ethnology," delves more deeply into anthropology and how ethnological ideas were used in the scholarly discourse about the Philippines in the 1880s to the 1890s. Ilustrados such as Pedro Paterno, José P. Rizal, and Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera used diverse approaches and data for varying ends. The different approaches "harnessed the possibilities of various scholarly discourses— race, history, civilization, and progress—in the service of promoting the Philippines, not necessarily against Spain, but as a location of advancing history" (83). Although with different ends in mind, they were able to reconstruct prehispanic Philippine society and begin to articulate the idea of "Filipino." In Chapter 3, "Practicing Folklore: Universal Science, Local Authority and Political Critique," the author hones in on the work of the foremost folklorist of the time, Isabelo de los Reyes. De los Reyes's work was already significant because of the sheer size of the data in what would become the first collection of Philippine, specifically Ilocano, folklore. More importantly for De los Reyes, folklore became a vehicle for criticism of contemporary governance and society in the Philippines (101), convincingly shown in numerous examples.

In Chapter 4, "Is 'K' a Foreign Agent? Philology as Anti-Colonial Politics," Thomas shifts focus to another ilustrado intellectual: Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera and his studies on philology and linguistics. A significant but often overlooked contribution was his proposal for a new orthography to standardize the Tagalog language. Pardo de Tavera observed that the combination of Spanish orthography and Tagalog grammar resulted in spelling irregularities (144), which could be resolved with the use of the new orthography, perhaps best represented by the use of the letter "k." The author narrates the storm of opinion raised by the substitution of "k" for "c" and "qu," with figures such as Rizal advocating the new orthography while others such as Pascual Poblete reviling it. Interestingly, Thomas points out the visual impact of "k" as changing the way Tagalog looked. "K not only changed the shape of Tagalog words, but it also helped obscure the Spanish origins of some Tagalog words" (165).

Chapter 5, "Lesson in History: The Decline of Spanish Rule and Revolutionary...