Making Mindanao: place-making and people-making in the southern Philippines

Abstract

When I was originally invited to give a keynote address for the two-day SOAS conference on Mindanao in July 2019 that formed the basis for this special volume, I offered a rather grandiose title for my talk as an attempt to link up to its theme of cartographies and identities: ‘Becoming Mindanao, becoming Mindanawon: narratives of place-making and people-making over the centuries’. With cartography pluralized, the conference theme embodied very aptly a fundamental reality of historical, political, anthropological and other types of academic research, i.e. that there can be multiple ways of representing and interpreting something, multiple ways of making it real, multiple ways of manifesting a place and its people. I had wanted to seize on this truth and use it as a jumping off point to talk about how we could nurture meaningful scholarship on Mindanao, and talk about the ways in which we construct and deconstruct both Mindanao and Mindanawons through our research. The wonderfully eclectic selection of papers that were presented – only a handful of which appear in this volume – provided a good cross-section of the quality, depth and diversity of scholarship possible for Mindanao, the southern Philippines more generally, and for other places like it. Places that, through the accident of modern national politics and history, have been relegated in academic research and scholarship to peripheral status at best, silence more commonly, in the face of national narratives, and total erasure at worst. This neglect of Mindanao is reinforced further by the cliquish tendencies of Philippine studies (as with any Area Studies endeavour), and its persistently ‘national’ optics that, to those of us who study ‘provincial’ places, peoples and topics, seems to bear down on our scholarship like an intellectual panopticon at times. In addition, academic research both in and on Mindanao – as represented in the annotated bibliography by the Mindanao Studies Consortium (2005) – has lagged relative to national scholarship, to the significant detriment of the field, as Patricio Abinales argues in ‘What sayeth the margins? A note on the state of Mindanao scholarship in Mindanao’ (this volume). In my own experience, scholarly voices speaking of or from Mindanao also tend to be explicitly provincialized, relegated to a lone ‘Mindanao’ panel at a Philippines conference regardless of the actual relatedness of their research topics. Thus the tremendous value of this conference, focused on this obscure(d) place, was in its deliberate centring of Mindanao not as a subset of Philippine studies nor removed entirely from it, but read autonomously in its own right. This approach has, by fortunate design, drawn scholars who