Key Publications by Oona Paredes
SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 2021
Indigenous Peoples, Heritage and Landscape in the Asia Pacific: Knowledge Co-Production and Empowerment (Edited by S. Acabado and D-W Kwan), 2021
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2019
What are the practical and cultural consequences of embracing the ‘Indigenous’ label? Despite uni... more What are the practical and cultural consequences of embracing the ‘Indigenous’ label? Despite universalising aspirations, the concept of indigeneity carries distinct political connotations in the Philippines, where the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act has created a bureaucracy that purportedly responds to the special needs of Indigenous Peoples, including the preservation of cultural traditions and securing title to ancestral lands. While laudatory on the surface, in practice the current legal and bureaucratic framework allows the state to impose its own definition of indigeneity, often compelling indigenous minorities to conform to stereotypes in order to acquire the fundamental rights and benefits that, by law, are supposed to be guaranteed. The Philippine states’ requirements for being recognised as ‘Indigenous’ are transforming how Indigenous Peoples maintain and perform their ancestral traditions, often leading to highly divisive internal debates about proper cultural and political representation. This article examines the case of Higaunon Lumads in northern Mindanao, who have been responding locally to over thirty years of national trends in participatory development that require increased engagement with government bureaucracy. I explore how ‘indigeneity’ has been defined and employed by Higaunons in the service of ‘preserving tradition’, the political and other consequences that have emerged in this context, and the perils of representing and commodifying indigeneity in modern Southeast Asia.
The anthropological study of Catholicism is difficult in a majority Catholic country like the Phi... more The anthropological study of Catholicism is difficult in a majority Catholic country like the Philippines because, unlike the case of a recent arrival like Protestantism, it is perhaps impossible, or even moot, to parse out what is either Catholic or indigenous about a particular cultural phenomenon. Even in the case of cultural outliers like the so-called ‘unchristianised’ indigenous minorities in the country’s peripheral upland regions, the tremendous impact of the Catholic thought-world in shaping who they are and their place in society today is masked substantially by their apparent cultural distinctiveness. While this problem might be seen as the province of historiography, it does configure our understanding of the present, which in turn has a direct impact on how we undertake anthropology in the very same spaces. This article argues that, in cases like that of the Philippines, the diachronic component is necessary to make sense of how Catholicism has not only shaped the diversity of cultures but also how, through extensive missionisation in the Spanish colonial period, it has configured cultural and political spaces so completely that, as anthropologists, we reproduce this thought-world uncritically through our own ethnographies. A focus on the so-called unchristianised Lumad ethnic minority groups of Mindanao shows how looking beyond Catholics as obvious subjects is relevant, and perhaps even necessary, to undertaking an anthropology of Catholicism.
Citizenship and Democratization in Postcolonial Southeast Asia (Edited by Ward Berenschot, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Laurens Bakker), 2016
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14631369.2015.1003690#.VM9aPjGUdwt
The Australian Journal of Anthropology 8(3):270-290, Aug 1997
Academic Reviews of my book by Oona Paredes
By Susan Russell
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021911815001527
By Ruth de Llobet
doi:10.1017/S0022463415000211
Additional Chapters in Books by Oona Paredes
In "Routledge Handbook of the Contemporary Philippines," edited by Mark Thompson and Eric Batalla, Dec 2017
Additional Journal Articles by Oona Paredes
Uploads
Key Publications by Oona Paredes
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780877277613/a-mountain-of-difference/#bookTabs=1
Academic Reviews of my book by Oona Paredes
Additional Chapters in Books by Oona Paredes
Additional Journal Articles by Oona Paredes
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780877277613/a-mountain-of-difference/#bookTabs=1