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Philippine Historiography: Trends & Issues

This document discusses the development of Philippine historiography and the efforts of Filipino historians to establish a historical perspective centered on the Filipino experience. It notes that Filipino historians have challenged the dominance of colonial narratives and aimed to explain aspects of Philippine history left unaddressed previously. The document also outlines how historical writing has evolved from the writings of Spanish friars to incorporate economic and sociocultural factors. Filipino historians have increasingly adopted methodologies emphasizing the Filipino worldview to broaden the bases of historical sources and interpretation.

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Jomari Mores
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2K views2 pages

Philippine Historiography: Trends & Issues

This document discusses the development of Philippine historiography and the efforts of Filipino historians to establish a historical perspective centered on the Filipino experience. It notes that Filipino historians have challenged the dominance of colonial narratives and aimed to explain aspects of Philippine history left unaddressed previously. The document also outlines how historical writing has evolved from the writings of Spanish friars to incorporate economic and sociocultural factors. Filipino historians have increasingly adopted methodologies emphasizing the Filipino worldview to broaden the bases of historical sources and interpretation.

Uploaded by

Jomari Mores
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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  • Philippine Historiography: Issues and Trends

Philippine Historiography: Issues and Trends

In the Philippines, the dominance of the colonial discourse has challenged Filipino
historians to write the history of the Philippines using a discourse that will privilege the
Filipinos. The accumulation of new data and the development of new theories gave Filipino
historians many aspects of Philippine history that were left unexplained. The study of
history became possible with the development of writing. The invention of writing can be
considered as one of the most important inventions of human civilizations that ended the
pre-historic age which also marked the beginning of the historic era. On the other hand,
historians continued to use traditions as one of the sources of history that headed through
different developments which strengthened the effort of Filipino historians to write a
history that will serve the Filipino people and a historiography that will offer a Filipino
perspective.

In contrast, although much of our history is devoted to political history, historians


of today have included and emphasized economic and socio-cultural history as an
important part of their discourse. Historical writing in the country has gone a long way
from the time of the Spanish friars faithfully recorder their observations about the cultures
of the early inhabitants of this land. Despite of the fact that colonial historiography is
considered hostile to the Filipinos, the writings of the colonizers had provided modern day
historians bases in their construction of the Philippine past. The period 1950s to early 90s
was considered as great eras in the history of the Philippine historical writing for it
produced dedicated Filipino historians who tried their best to re-direct the writing of
Philippine history. In comparison to the writings during the Spanish and American era, the
writings of history during the post-war era can be considered revolutionary for the effort
of Filipino historians to write the history of the Philippines using a Filipino perspective. In
accordance to the historians who worked hard to come up with historical writings that can
be used for a better understanding of the Philippines and its people and together with their
foreign counterparts, Filipino historians produced scholarly works explaining the
Philippines and its people.

Right from the start, Filipino historians became followers of a very rigid tradition
in writing history – a tradition based on positivism and because of the weaknesses of this
tradition, a new historical approach emerged that seeks the interpretation of facts from all
perspective, including those that do not concern history before and it’s known as New
Historicism. After the EDSA Revolution, Filipino historians became more aggressive in
their efforts to present a Filipino perspective in writing history. Filipino scholars like Zeus
Salazar and the advocates of Pantayong Pananaw (PP) have presented studies using
Filipino (Tagalog) as medium in their academic discourse which opened new venues and
themes for historians to study like the world view of the indigenous, anting-anting,
symbolic representation, reduccion and other themes that discuss the culture of the
Filipinos. Hence, in the Philippines, as early as 1960’s, historians exerted efforts to broaden
the bases of their historical sources, and provided new and fresh interpretations that
challenged the traditional discourses in history and different articles were published that
truly emphasized the need to develop a methodology for interpretative historical analysis
within the context of Philippine society and in this regard, new methodologies and concepts
were utilized like ethnography and folk literature.

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