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Fiesta and Community: Philippine Folk Culture, Part One
| Article
# : |
18773 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
3,008 Words |
| Author
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Linda Pandes Jacob
Linda Pandes Jacob, a graduate of Colegio de Santa Isabel in
the Philippines, works on the editorial staff of the
Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto, California. She is also
a contributing editor and feature/travel writer for Asia
Pacific Travel Magazine. |
It is community expression sensationalized by a people's penchant for celebration and merrymaking. Philippine fiesta is an accumulative tradition that incorporates folk practices from the pre-Spanish era until today. It is a conglomerate of beliefs, mores, and ancient and modernized superperstition that reveals much about the Filipino psyche.
The fiesta derives from the religious character of the nation and is anchored on religious themes. But contrary to popular belief, the custom was not entirely an innovation dating from the arrival of Spaniards in the Philippines more than four hundred years ago. Natives of pre-Hispanic time held assemblies to fulfill the same basic purposes: worship, thanksgiving, petition, commemoration, celebration. Though pagan in nature and structure, their gatherings elicited contributions of resources, talent, time, and effort. The success of the collective endeavor was itself cause for celebration. For in territories divided by language, mountains, rivers, and ocean, calls for assemblage cut into relative hardships. At any rate, the beckoning evoked response. When drums beat the call to all corners of the locale, emergence of the flock soon followed. Authority was the drawing force.
Such were the native temperament and conditioning that confronted the Spaniards who arrived to colonize the islands. A sense of bayanihan, or community, was apparent. To the inhabitants of the islands, gatherings were a way of affirming and upholding community loyalties. Rather than go against the grain of the existing cultural fabric, the conquistadors saw fit to expand on it, incorporating more threads into the fabric and waving circles where there were squares, angular shapes where there were spheres. However, the fabric remained the same, only laden with more complex design and glitter. The combination became a symbiosis of ancestry and novelty, creating a culture that is neither archaic nor sub-European nor sub-Western, but uniquely Filipino.
Folklore vivifies the origin of certain fiestas. Tales relate feats of valor under the leadership of an angel intervening in human battles, miracles of healing to hopeless invalids, gifts of childbirth to the barren, bounties of harvest following an extended drought, and deliverance from war or natural calamity. Fiestas transpose dreams into reality and give harsh realities the fabric of dreams.
The mystic aura surrounding the fiesta inspires mass participation and continuity of tradition. The fiesta has become an antidote to the normal stresses and rigors of daily life, as
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