My Mojares Critical Essay

The Risk of Context: A Critical Essay on Resil Mojares’

Theater in Society, Society in Theater: A Social History of a Cebuano Village 1840-1940

Publish Date: January 1985

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Ateneo de Manila University Press

Pages: 200

 

Art historical discourse can take on different masks and subdued ideologies founded in a single system of meaning. It is an important role of art history to unmask these ideologies, recover the humanity in cultural products and invite inquiry and critical analogy in doing so.

This intention is evident in Resil Mojares’ 1985 book Theater in Society, Society in Theater: Social History of a Cebuano Village 1840-1940. This three-part exploration of the complex relationship of the Linambay, an indigenized form of Komedya in Cebu, and the agents that produced it is a gripping narrative that successfully blends the three methodologies of literary criticism, cultural anthropology, and history. The first part relates the processes of integration and dissolution in the structure of the barrio of Valladolid in Carcar, Southern Cebu, from 1500 to 1940. It then analyzes the dynamics of the Linambay tradition and eventually explores the social and economic conditions in the barrio in the early twentieth century revealing the intricacies of such a relationship.

 

Fiesta Complex

Grounding the Linambay form in the fiesta complex, the author impressed on the reader anthropological theories like that of Maurice Godilier’s. Mojares discussed fiestas as a system for redistribution of wealth and how it validated and cemented social relations. This, in turn, created the foundation for the thriving of this theater form. It is interesting how the author investigated on this and how successful he was in discovering the role of the social in an event such as the Linambay. He established social cohesion as integral in the existence of the art form and social diffusion as the reason for its disappearance. He made his point plausible by presenting important historical documents and verbal sources.

The fiesta complex is important in supporting the research’s motive. It is in this context that the author positioned the subject of Linambay as a mode of Valladolid’s to celebrate itself and in the process revealing its structure. He quoted Clifford Geertz saying, “societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them.” The author considered Linambay as one such point of access.

 

Peasant Community

Another salient point in his presentation of ideas is the nature of the barrio of Valladolid as a peasant community. One that is torn between two worlds: “on one hand, the larger world of market, state, and urban culture; and on the other, a vanishing tribal world of village autonomy and personalized intra-village relations. The former advances, the latter recedes, and somewhere in the middle ground of these movements, the peasant village exists” (p. 93). This duality in the nature of the peasant society in question creates the unique tension that is important in understanding the art form. The society is never truly in either side of the pole and neither can be said of the Linambay. Persisting in the middle of the polarity, the author recreated the complexity of the lost theater form in an imaginative approach to locate the relevance and meaning of it in the lives of those who lived during the time it persisted and those who lived and continues to live after it.

The patron-client relationship is given premium in the discussion using James Scott’s “vertical solidarity model” which identifies reciprocity between landlords and tenants in such a community. This approach demystifies the unknown type of social relation during that time and reinstates the roles of each player in this multipart spectrum of give-and-take. It solidifies the perspective of the people who created the Linambay as it anchors them between deference and submission. 

Economic Basis

The economic basis of the art form was also discussed in an elaborate manner. The author amply provided the readers of pertinent information in the trade and industry of the society that cradled the art form. In the first chapter of the book, he presented historical facts on land ownership, taxation, and even fluctuations in crop prices to serve as backdrop to the moral order that Valladolid had during the flourishing of the art form.

The author also exposed the social backdrop as economically dependent. He pursued a presentation of the prominent families that dominated the social landscape of the village by revealing just how much these families actually own by means of land and other forces of production like carabaos, mechanical equipments, and even tenants. This discussion is relevant in locating the Linambay tradition in the hands of the elite, and the submission of the tenants as the author recreated the social order of the village. He also revealed by means of kinship analysis how this social order was preserved via affinal and ritual links.

Although the economic was discussed vis-à-vis the art form, the integrity of the art form in the discussion did not entirely rely on it. The economic was considered important but the author found this to be just one of the factors that eventually caused the collapse of the Linambay tradition:

“What happened, in essence was that changes in the technical material or material order of society drained the symbolic force of the Linambay tradition.

There are two aspects in this loss of power. On one hand, the surrounding reality no longer infused meaning and power into the system of symbols that was the Linambay. The context has collapsed. On the other hand, the system itself lost its power to structure and pattern the moral life of the village. The causal connections here are not simple and unilinear. We need to consider that art is not an inert product of social processes but an agent of these processes (p. 126).”

 

 

 

Literary Criticism

 

Having a solid background in literary criticism surely added another layer of interest in the author’s discourse. The Linambay, an indigenized form of Komedya, is a lost theater form, which made just even getting a copy of a script difficult. However, the author was successful in obtaining several and in revealing the complexity of this form. He provided an intricate analysis of the texts and even the manner how these plays were performed. He masterfully dissected important semiotic representations in the texts uncovering that indeed theater is in society, and society in theater.

Another point of interest of the study centered on how the plays were performed. The author revealed that the presentation of these plays were very social events and diffused in nature such that one need not finish the play in one sitting because of the length of the plays itself (with some lasting up to nine days). Aside from this, the plays were more of a reminder to people than an introduction to new concepts. The people knew the plot of the play and what should happen. They were just reinstatements of the existing moral code, not a discovery of new ones.

Relating the social to the manner these plays were performed, it is remarkable how the author presented social stratification based on where the people actually viewed the plays. While the important families had the so-called palcos, a roofed platform extending out of the stage or a separate shed, the rest would diffuse squatting on the ground, eating, cooking a meal, sleeping and even gambling (p. 76).

 

On Methodology

Mojares’ research is a welcome contribution to Philippine cultural studies. Its approach, rather encompassing and outright, attempts to veer away from simplifying aesthetic discourse as purely social nor economic by endeavoring the integration of the fields of history, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. This integration is effective in bringing out more aspects in the art form than one would have focusing on a single approach.

However effective, this integration of fields proposes the danger of leaving out some important readings and in effect reducing the art form to a certain degree reachable by the study (or the author) itself. The lack of perspective in sexuality and gender, for instance, takes away a vast amount of possibilities that would’ve created a more exact social history that he was aiming for, among others. Conversely, this would’ve thrown the perspective of the general concerns of the fields he was working with out of the way to accommodate the specific concerns of each field.

The problematics of the general versus the specific in historical writing is indeed a value-laiden query that any author must answer in the goal of exacting the effectivity and relevance of their research to the limit-experience of the readers that they are writing for. In the case of Mojares’ work, I can only assume the specific problems (or the ones that I was looking for) in the three fields he chose to work with were not yet that pronounced being it written in 1985. Considering this, it is the reader’s duty to contextualize a work and read within (and between) the lines of this limit as much as it is the author’s responsibility to posit the discourse to meet and create the challenges of its time.