Merchandising and sanctity: the invasive cult of Padre Pio

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the Blessed Padre Pio da Pietrelcina (1887-1968) became a 'saint' of global stature. It is most exceptional for the cult of a saint to acquire such dimensions in so short a time. Further, this is the story not of someone with a modern profile of sanctity,but someone who on the contrary answers to the traditional model of sanctity, and whose cult is moreover characterized by an instrumental devotional repertoire. Despite this 'classic' model, his person and cult are extremely ambiguous. This article describes and analyses the processes which have brought and continue to bring this about, and the recent development of the cult in Italy. By these processes a controversial cult, often associated with anti-ecclesiastical devotional activities and of limited scope, has become one of the most important and irreproachable in Italy. In part through the personal support of Pope John Paul II, in about a decade Padre Pio has grown from a friar in a controversial fundamentalist context to an almost invulnerable national saint, who is beginning to become a part of the Italian identity. The power of his cult is so strong - a devotional avalanche - that it has sidelined other cults, and to an increasingly large degree defines the Italian sacred landscape. The Pio cult encroaches on other devotions, and moreover is becoming its own competitor: to an increasing degree Pio's central pilgrimage site at San Giovanni Rotondo is losing pilgrims to the secondary pilgrimage site at Pietrelcina and to the hundreds of chapels and local shrines that have sprung up the length of Italy.     

Women,Nationalism and the Philippine Revolution

Abstract. Filipino women participated actively in the Philippine Revolution (1896–1902), performing a wide range of tasks essential to sustaining the revolutionary challenge against Spanish and American imperialism. Though largely omitted from mainstream histories of the nationalist revolution, women's involvement has been recorded in several marginalised texts. However, these texts have invariably used a limiting format based on presenting biographies of outstanding women. This article suggests an alternative approach, by situating the history of revolutionary Filipino women within a comparative framework. The article outlines key ideas of feminist writers who have analysed women's participation in nationalist struggles from an international perspective. Drawing on these ideas, some new approaches to women in the Philippine Revolution are suggested.     

Gender,Identity and Agency in Philippine Upland Development

Conventional feminist political analysis has considered male interests as historically institutionalized by the state, thereby claiming that women are largely ‘edged out’ in state programmes. By studying a state programme of granting ancestral domain tenurial rights to the Kalanguya in the northern Philippines, this article argues instead that women also edge themselves out. Kalanguya village women have linked with markets and are less interested in tenurial struggles with the state since such struggles underscore their indigeneity and their special role as resource managers, an identity they wish to discard. Men, for their part, attach themselves to the past and identify themselves as being ‘indigenous’ to make claims on land in the present, strategically aligning themselves with the state agenda on sustainable resource management. This article explores perspectives that provide more nuanced understandings of the different ways in which women and men may position and identify themselves as ‘indigenous’ as they engage with state programmes and markets, and argues that, under certain conditions, women through their agency may not be the natural constituency for natural resource management‐related programmes that they are often assumed to be.     

Decentralization, democratization, and health: the Philippine experiment

In 1991, the Philippines joined a growing list of countries that reformed health planning through decentralization. Reformers viewed decentralization as a tool that would solve multiple problems, leading to more meaningful democracy and more effective health planning. Today, nearly two decades after the passage of decentralization legislation, questions about the effectiveness of the reforms persist. Inadequate financing, inequity, and a lack of meaningful participation remain challenges, in many ways mirroring broader weaknesses of Philippine democracy. These concerns pose questions regarding the nature of contemporary decentralization, democratization, and health planning and whether these three strategies are indeed mutually enforcing.     

菲律宾史前文化与华南的关系

近百年的史前考古资料表明,菲律宾群岛是华南百越系统的土著文化沟通西南太平洋之南岛语族文化的主要纽带,在菲律宾史前文化序列中有来自华南大陆的文化因素,其旧石器、新石器和早期金属器时代考古学文化的主体内涵均表现出与华南大陆的密切关系。     

“菲律宾华侨华人之研究”与日本

本文试图就日本有关菲律宾华侨华人研究之背景及其概况作一简单的梳理。因为虽然包括华侨华人研究在内,日本有关东南亚的研究,从战前至今积累了丰硕的成果,但是由于研究载体和媒介语的障碍,这些研究并未为日语圈以外,尤其是中、英文源流的研究者所广泛了解。一般而言,海外主要是通过以英文发表的著作来了解日本的研究状况。也正因如此,本文将对象限定于相关的日文论著,而不包括日本学者发表的中、英文或其他文字的论著。这个问题的意义远远不限于某一特定语种的翻译,而透视出近代亚洲的自我认识与他者认识,是通过欧洲这一媒介才得以进行的历…     

Mercantile Transformations: Understanding the State,Global Debt and Philippine Agriculture

This paper examines an important continuity in the political economy of the Philippines: the interplay between domestic merchant capitalists and the state over the role of the state in the Philippine economy. During the Marcos regime, this interplay increasingly took the form of competition between state mercantile interests and ‘private’ merchant interests. This competition is still being played out. To better understand the nature of the competition, consideration is focused on two essential contemporary facts: the Philippines has a major external debt crisis and the Philippines, still predominantly an agrarian country, suffers from stagnant productivity growth and enduring rural poverty. While the Philippine external debt problem can be attributed in significant part to various international hegemonic interests, the analysis concludes that the characteristics of the crisis primarily reflect changing state/class/economy configurations within the Philippines. These same configurations, in turn, significantly influence the implications of the external debt crisis on Philippine agriculture.     

Integrating History and Archaeology in the Study of Contact Period Philippine Chiefdoms

Malay texts, Philippine oral traditions, Chinese tributary records and geographies, early Spanish writings, and archaeological evidence from Philippine sites present divergent views of political structures and political economies in Philippine chiefdoms of the late first millennium to midsecond millennium A.D. While some sources claim a political landscape dominated by a few large-scale, highly centralized polities almost wholly supported through foreign trade, others suggest the presence of more heterogeneous and politically segmented configurations of varying scale and complexity and with eclectic economic bases. These disparate narratives are evaluated in terms of methodological biases, their cultural context, and the historical circumstances of their production.     

Early Twentieth-Century Catalan Regionalist Theory: Lluís Duran I Ventosa,His Times,and the Influence of the Austrian Empire

Abstract. The constitutional question of how to treat ethnic minorities within the context of a greater state has presented problems since the age of nationalism up to the present day. Several Catalan political theorists from the beginning of the twentieth century produced a large quantity of generally overlooked and untranslated work on the subject, which defined a terminology and discussed solutions in a manner coherent enough to be applicable to most times and places, and to withstand the test of scrutiny alongside better-known theorists. The thoughts of Lluis Duran i Ventosa, the theorist behind the Catalan regionalist movement in the first quarter of this century, deserve special exposure. He and his contemporaries demonstrated great understanding not only of their context within Spain, but also of generally applicable concepts, as well as an understanding of other societies, notably the Austrian Empire.