Ricardo G Abad

This report shows how aspects of Filipino religiosity compare with those found in twelve countries in North America, Australasia, the British Isles, Continental Europe, and the Near East.  Data were obtained from a 1991 cross-country survey organized by the International Social Survey Programme, with the Philippine data gathered the same year by the Social Weather Stations (SWS). This report starts with a discussion of religious beliefs and practices, followed by similar cross-country comparisons on items dealing with one's relationship with God on supernatural or folk beliefs, and on the connection between religiosity and secular attitudes.  A concluding section lists those areas where Filipinos stand unique relative to other countries and draws out broad implications of these findings for an understanding of Filipino religiosity.  The study shows that while levels of religious belief and practice vary considerably from one country to another, religion remains an important aspect of people's lives worldwide.  Nowhere is this truer than in the Philippines.  The Philippines joins the United  States and Ireland as among the most religious and  devout  countries in the world,  and  if the ranking  was based  solely on religiosity self­ratings and feeling "extremely close" to God, the Philippines would stand  out as the most religious among the thirteen nations participating  in the survey.  Filipinos, compared to other nationalities, also appear to have the closest ties to their churches, and that Filipino Catholics, while generally conservative, are more liberal than Filipino non-Catholics as far as sexual attitudes are concerned.  However, a sizable proportion, close to half to be precise, are strongly bound  to superstitious beliefs; moreover, more than two out of five still cling to a fatalistic view of life. The persistence of animism and fatalism in the Philippines reflects the continuing encounter between official and folk practices that have characterized Filipino religious behavior since the days of Spanish colonization. How this continuing encounter shapes Filipino religiosity, how it affects other areas of Philippine life, and how levels of religiosity vary among subgroups in the population are among the main analytic tasks of social scientists who seek to understand Filipino religious behavior.

Analysis of a 1987 cross-country survey on social inequality has shown that country support for welfare and income redistribution was greater in five social democracies of Europe than in the capitalist nations of Australia and the United States.  These varying levels of support, it is argued, reflect ideological differences between the two political economies. While citizens of European nations have come to adopt an ideology of outcome, preferring a society with negligible differences in income and living standards, those from capitalist countries have accepted an ideology of opportunity, preferring to level chances for success rather than actual outcomes.  What ideology applied in the Philippine case?  To answer this question, data from a 1992 nationwide survey conducted by Social Weather Stations (5W5) were compared with selected countries that participated in the 1992 second-round survey on social inequality.  None of the two ideologies, however, explains the Philippine pattern. What appears to prevail is neither the ideologies  of outcome  and opportunity,  but the ideology of patronage.  From  this  perspective,  Filipinos  do not  see welfare  policies as obligations  performed by an impersonal  state for its citizens, but  as a set of rights  and  duties expected between patron and client.  Patrons assist and  protect clients  in  exchange  for  their  loyalty  and  support the  arrangement is reciprocal, and  the  ties  personal and binding.

This paper reviews the arguments about whther internal and international migrtaion can,or should, be incorporated in the same migrationtheories or models, and to examine the ways in which the two processes are linked in a variety of contexts. Based on a value-expectancy framework, the findings of the Philippine Migration Study (PMS) confirm that a global model of migration decision-making is feasible. (A longer abstract appears int he text.)

How does theatre interrogate a nation that preaches racial harmony on one hand yet practices racial inequality on the other? Focusing on the work of the Five Arts Centre, an artistic company in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this paper finds that this engagement takes place on the symbolic plane where theatre offers its audiences with alternative scenarios of a pluralistic Malaysia as a means to destabilize the state’s policies on racial privileging and political suppression – and without being banned. To do so, however, requires a collective that commits itself to a frame of action that fuses the artistic and the political, and an organization that is able to acquire and mobilize enough social, cultural and political capital to sustain its creative energies. Such is the work of a cultural movement.

A Filipino Ateneo production in January 2002 of The Taming of the Shrew –Ang Pagpapaamo sa Maldita in Filipino translation -- becomes the site to reflect on Philippine-American relations during the early U.S. colonial period in the Philippines. In the production, Petruchio is an American military officer and Katherina is the daughter of a wealthy merchant in a provincial town. Both are not simply characters but representations of their respective countries. Petruchio is the brash, American military officer who attempts to discipline the feisty Filipina named Katherina, and the entire taming process is seen as an illustration of the American colonial policy called “benevolent assimilation" or "white love." This paper describes the postcolonial discourse implicit in the production that also uses the theater conventions of the time, the zarzuela and the bodabil, to counterpoint the action of the play. Katherina's final speech on marital fidelity is performed in the d...

In this speech given on behalf of the 2001 Metrobank Outstanding Teacher awardees, the author compares the task of teaching to the work of a master potter of ceramic vases.  Teachers, like master potters, see their work as vocation and not as craft.  And as vocation, achieving perfection lies in the relentless giving of oneself to the task of molding the best possible student, or in the case of the potter, the perfect glaze of the ceramic vase. In this task both the teacher/potter and the fires of excellence are one.

What do the social sciences preach?  What kind of student outcomes can be expected based on what the social sciences preach?  What teaching strategies will help produce those outcomes?  Combining biography and pedagogical research, the paper answers these questions and in the process,  identifies seven teaching strategies suitable for the social science college classroom.

Sintang Dalisay (Pure Love), a theatrical  production based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and a Filipino metrical romance written in 1901, deployed the igal, a dance tradition of the Sama-Bajau, a Muslim community in Southern Philippines, as its movement motif.  The use of this motif dictated other production elements, specifically the kind of music to be used, the decision to relocate the play in a Muslim community, the design of set and costumes, and the change of character names to more local appellations. The production adopted a collaborative approach to theater-making, working with local dance masters and musicians to teach actors and to align the reconfiguration of the dance with community practice.  The result of this collaborative effort, laudable in general to audiences, also met with resistance from several fronts. This paper assesses the reception of the work, and finds that the task of reconfiguring folk performance, must contend with issues of cultural and political representation

This article focuses on the impact of the family reunification provisions in the United States immigration policy for legal immigration from the Philippines. Immigration and Naturalization Service data on the changing pattern of Philippine immigration to the United States between 1971 and 1984 show an increase of nearly two-and-a-half times in the number of immediate family members exempt from numerical limitations, a doubling in the number of immigrants entering under family preference categories, but a marked decline in the number of occupational preference immigrants. Immigration-related plans, behavior, and characteristics from the immigrants' perspective are also analyzed. A family reunification policy-based typology has been constructed to categorize intended and actual immigrants to the United States. Using this typology, systematic differences are reported for out-migration plans, family contacts, the immigrant process, and the characteristics of intended and actual immigrants.

An ethnographic study of Smokey Mountain, a dump site community in Metro Manila, Philippines reveals a well-organized ecological niche that sustains people and community.  But because the dump site is a public land, insecurity of home tenure is a major concern as state authorities or private interests can force their relocation to places far from jobs and livelihood. For the time being, Smokey Mountain that over the years is the source of their salvation and the roots of their tragedy as well.

he relationship between intentions and behavior is basic to
micro-level migration decision research. This study, set in the rural
Philippine province of llocos Norte, provides evidence on personal
and structural background factors and value-expectancy perceptions
of place utility that predict migration intentions and behavior. Sepa
rate analyses are conducted for general intentions to move and for
destination-specific migration intentions, the latter pertaining to both
internal migration (Manila) and international migration (Hawaii).
Logistic regression analyses applied to the data from a 1980-82
longitudinal survey show that the empirical models are highly efficient
in explaining migration intentions but less efficient in explaining
actual migration behavior in this Third World setting.

This study compares determinants of internal and international 
migration intentions, drawing upon interview data from a sample of
adults in Ilocos Norte, a largely rural province in the Philippines.
A regression model is applied to test the relative determinants of
intentions to migrate to Manila and to Hawaii. The study is based on a
value-expectancy model of migration decision making. The results
document the importance of subjective expectations related to

A close look at 50 memoirs written by past and present staff members of the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC) to mark the Institute’s 50th Anniversary elicits several themes:  first research experience, rigorous work, group support, mentorship, and fidelity to a vision.  One way to link these themes is to see the IPC experience as a three-stage sequence of organizational commitment. The first begins with entry to the IPC, a defining moment for many, where staffers experience a new work culture and find themselves challenged by research demands. The second stage entails an immersion into the research craft, with emphasis on two experiences: (1) the lessons learned and the insights gained, academic and personal, while dong research; and (2) the bonds of collegiality, or the web of support shared by IPC staffers regardless of rank or responsibility. Most special of these bonds are those formed by mentorship, freely given by the IPC’s senior staff, notably that of IPC’s founder, Frank Lynch, S.J.  As learning increases and ties strengthen comes the third stage, commitment, where former recruits, now more seasoned in work, identify with the Institute’s ideals and use these as convictions in their professional and personal lives, even after they have left the IPC for work or study elsewhere.  As IPC adjusts to the changing context of contract research in the Philippines, including a restructuring of its ties to the Ateneo de Manila University, much hope goes to the retention of those work practices that made the IPC of the first fifty years a place where researchers can learn and grow, and where social science imprints its mark in building the nation.

Review of findings of two national surveys of religion, the first conducted in 1991 and the second in 1998, administered to s sample of adult Filipinos, 18 years and over, and conducted by the Social Weather Stations in association with the International Social Survey Programme.