Mojares' "Theater in Society, Society in Theater"

I'm currently writing a critical essay on this book. It's a historical discourse using a lost theater form--komedya. Fun.

Complete Title: Theater in Society, Society in Theater:
Social History of a Cebuano Village (1840-1940)
Author: Resil Mojares
Publish Date: January 1985
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Ateneo de Manila University Press
Pages: 200

About The Book
(taken from its back cover)

Theater in Society, Society in Theater is both a detailed and imaginative reconstruction of the history of a Philippine village, the barrio of Valladolid in Carcar, Southern Cebu. Though the history ranges from the 1500s to 1940, the focus is trained on a time of increased peasantization, the late nineteenth century and the first four decades of the present century. In tracing the history of the village, the author analyzes transformations in its moral order as revealed in the external and internal changes of the village theater tradition, the tradition of the linambay, or komedya.

In three main parts, the book sketches the processes of integration and dissolution in the structure of the village from the 1500s to 1940, analyzes the dynamics of the linambay tradition, and explores the social and economic conditions in the barrio in the early twentieth century to show how, indeed, theater is embedded in society, and society in theater.

In its combination of the methods of literary criticism, cultural anthropology, and history, the work is an important contribution to Philippine studies.