The Way of the Cross: Suffering Selfhoods in the Roman Catholic Philippines by Julius Bautista (review)

Self-flagellation and voluntary crucifixion annually attract publicity nationally and internationally. Supposedly, their practitioners have a bizarre preoccupation with sin and atonement. However, scholarly research over the past forty years has debunked this glib supposition. Anthropologists have shown through detailed interviews and field observations that the rituals are actually fulfillments of promises (panata) made to God for help in meeting emergencies among close kin. Julius Bautista, an anthropologist and associate professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, enriches this scholarly tradition by examining the experience of pain in an intersubjective context and unlocking linguistic expressions. Because the ethnography’s site is Pampanga province, he highlights Kapampangan expressions to reveal deeply held interpretations. Unfortunately, in a rare lapse, he calls Kapampangan a dialect rather than a language (31).

The Christian is asked to remember how Christ’s passion and death saved mankind. Within the Catholic Church, painful self-discipline has traditionally accompanied this remembering to ensure that Christ’s followers can truly embody Him. In chapter 1, as a historical background, the author recounts how Spanish missionaries introduced European devotional practices that punished the body. From the beginning, their converts exercised agency by using such practices even outside the missionaries’ control. Bautista examines how “suffering selfhood” has created a devotional context in which lay Catholics today experience God in their lives.

Bautista’s ethnography revolves around three rituals. In addition to the expected self-flagellation and crucifixion, in chapter 2 he examines chanting. Availing himself of recent anthropological and sociological interest in the sensuous communication of meanings, he analyzes the “ensounded” environment of the chanting that pervades the Philippine Holy Week. He shifts attention away from the chanted text, which is the theme of historian Reynaldo Ileto in Pasyon and Revolution (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979), by exploring the “emotional contagion” (33) that brings the chanter, the listeners, and the flagellants together. The chanters take turns singing continuously for several hours the long poem on the passion of Christ. When a chanter’s voice lags out of exhaustion after three hours, outsiders might tag this ritual as a “failed” one, but Bautista says that the chanter interprets this drained voice as the very proof of a commitment to share in Christ’s ordeal (38). Intelligibility is not necessarily the chanting’s goal. The chanting aims rather at a pervasive emotion of bereavement that, paradoxically, is also celebratory for it draws together all those present into a felt fellowship. Amplified by a sound system, the chanting attracts flagellants who pause before the chanting’s site to pray. Hence, an encounter takes place. While the chanter recounts Christ’s ordeal, in a soundscape of bereavement, the flagellant relives it somatically.

Although in chapter 3 Bautista agrees with other previous anthropologists in showing that self-flagellation has nothing to do with sin, this chapter is most excellent in blazing the trail for new insights. He notes that the Kapampangan term pagdarame is at the core of the ritual (46). Akin to the Tagalog pakikiramay, the term signifies “to empathize with.” However, this empathy goes beyond merely feeling with the suffering of another self. It also denotes a participation, even if imagined, in that suffering selfhood. It is an empathy that is “triangulated,” for it involves three subjectivities: the flagellant, Christ, and the suffering loved one. The flagellant becomes a supplicant-intercessor who humbles himself by somatically simulating Christ’s physical ordeal in order that Christ might lessen the loved one’s suffering.

But this self-flagellation can also be undertaken for other reasons. Bautista cites Miguel, who was certain that his previous pagdarame had so fortified his self that he successfully endured his Saudi employers’ arrogance when he worked as an overseas Filipino worker (OFW) (55). In the case of Ramon, whose wife is a medical technician in the Middle East, he practices pagdarame to empathize with her pain in being away from...