Books by Julius Bautista
Honolulu, Hawai'i SOUTHEAST ASIA / PHILIPPINES / CHRISTIANITY / ETHNOGRAPHY "Julius Bautista's Th... more Honolulu, Hawai'i SOUTHEAST ASIA / PHILIPPINES / CHRISTIANITY / ETHNOGRAPHY "Julius Bautista's The Way of the Cross offers an ethnographically rich and elegantly holistic account of the Philippines' most recognized and sensational of Holy Week rituals. Bautista challenges universalized assumptions about the meaning of imitating Christ's suffering, showing how Filipinos transform ritual pain into positive forms of religious selfhood that are first and foremost embedded in the social. Like the best ethnographies, The Way of the Cross both grounds its analysis in diverse scholarly literatures and draws from vernacular concepts to theorize anew, all in the spirit of comparative and cross-cultural studies. It is a welcome contribution to the anthropology of Christianity, Philippine Studies, and much more. " -DEIRDRE DE LA CRUZ, University of Michigan -PAUL-FRANÇOIS TREMLETT, The Open University Julius Bautista is associate professor at
What role do objects play in crafting the religions of Southeast Asia and shaping the experiences... more What role do objects play in crafting the religions of Southeast Asia and shaping the experiences of believers? The Spirit of Things explores religious materiality in a region marked by shifting boundaries, multiple beliefs, and trends toward religious exclusivism. While most studies of religion in Southeast Asia focus on doctrines or governmental policy, contributors to this volume recognize that religious "things"—statues, talismans, garments, even sacred automobiles—are crucial to worship, and that they have a broad impact on social cohesion. By engaging with `religion in its tangible forms, faith communities reiterate their essential narratives, allegiances, and boundaries, and negotiate their coexistence with competing belief systems. These ethnographic and historical studies of Southeast Asia furnish us with intriguing perspectives on wider debates concerning the challenges of secularization, pluralism, and interfaith interactions around the world.
In this volume, contributors offer rich ethnographic analyses of religious practices in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Burma that examine the roles materiality plays in the religious lives of Southeast Asians. These essays demonstrate that religious materials are embedded in a host of practices that enable the faithful to negotiate the often tumultuous experience of living amid other believers. What we see is that the call for plurality, often initiated by government, increases the importance of religious objects, as they are the means by which the distinctiveness of a particular faith is “fenced” in a field of competing religious discourses. This project is called “the spirit of things” to evoke both the “aura” of religious objects and the power of material things to manifest “that which is fundamental” about faith and belief.
This book is about a statue of Christ as a boy worshiped by millions of Filipinos from all walks ... more This book is about a statue of Christ as a boy worshiped by millions of Filipinos from all walks of life. Today the Santo Niño --said to be the same wooden figure brought to the islands by Ferdinand Magellan at the moment of his 1521 "discovery" of the Philippines--is enshrined in a bullet-proof glass case in a Basilica that hosts throngs of devotees during its Friday novenas. The author combines ethnography with historiography and discourse analysis to study how our most prevalent assumptions about the figure are produced and disseminated. What ideas have sustained such assumptions after all this time? How did the figure become such a popular "national" treasure? To what can we attribute the Santo Niño's appeal outside the official doctrines of the Catholic faith? This book looks at historical documents, popular songs, news articles, poems, and oral accounts to address such questions. In doing so, the book describes the contours of a "figured" Catholicism as the context in which we can think about the Santo Niño in ways we have not done before.
Christianity is one of the most rapidly growing religions in Asia. Despite the challenges of poli... more Christianity is one of the most rapidly growing religions in Asia. Despite the challenges of political marginalisation, church organisations throughout much of Asia are engaged in activities - such as charity, education and commentary on public morality - that may either converge or conflict with the state's interests. Considering Christianity’s growing prominence, and the various ways Asian nation states respond to this growth, this book brings into sharper analytical focus the ways in which the faith is articulated at the local, regional, and global level.
Contributors from diverse disciplinary and institutional backgrounds offer in-depth analyses of the complex interactions between Asian nation-states and Christianity in the context of modernisation and nation-building. Exploring the social and political ramifications of Christian conversions in Asia and their impact on state policies, the book analyses how Christian followers, missionaries, theologians and activists negotiate their public roles and identities vis-à-vis various forms of Asian states, particularly in the context of post-colonial nation-building and socio-economic development.
This volume represents a critical contribution to the existing scholarship on Christianity's global reach and its local manifestations, and demonstrates the significance of the Asian experience in our understanding of Christianity as a global religion.
Refereed Journal Articles by Julius Bautista
This paper features a discussion of how educators can channel anthropological practices towards t... more This paper features a discussion of how educators can channel anthropological practices towards the enhancement of experien-tial learning (EL) teaching methods, particularly on the topic of religion across the Asia-Pacific. I argue that our capacity to achieve curricular objectives through EL calls for an attentiveness to the affinity between the empirical challenges confronted by ethnogra-phers, who work to create rapport between researcher and subject , and classroom teachers who seek to cultivate a conducive learning environment beyond the classroom walls. I show the pedagogical implications of the ways anthropologists have oper-ationalized their discipline's " critical turn " by highlighting two experiential domains: (1) through activities of " uncomfortable " stereotype self-inventory and (2) through a dialogic pedagogy that pursues meaningful learning outcomes through the " struggle " to recognize inter-cultural and religious agency among students.
In this article I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2013 in San Pedro C... more In this article I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2013 in San Pedro Cutud, a village located in the Philippine province of Pampanga. The focus is on the performance of the Via Crucis y Passion y Muerte, a passion play held there every year on Good Fri-day. Central to the play is the individual pursuit of panata, or divine pledge, by the cast of around forty actors, and particularly by the play's main protagonist: the Kristo, who is nailed to a cross in front of tens of thousands of spectators. In the first part, I describe how the cast engages in the production of a particular theatrical aesthetic that is coterminous with the embodied pursuit of their respective appeals for divine intervention. In the latter portion, I focus on the act of nailing as a context for the formation of intersubjective bonds of trust, or tiuala ya lub, between the Kristo, and his ritual associates. By describing how rituals of pain are premised upon the shareability and entrustedness of ritual agency, I situate the ethnographic data on passion rituals in relation to wider discussions about the anthropological turn to affect.
Cultural Anthropology, 2015
In this essay I examine how a Catholicized economic ethos in the Philippines is promulgated by rh... more In this essay I examine how a Catholicized economic ethos in the Philippines is promulgated by rhetorical pronouncements about the positive value of sacrifice that rationalizes the cultivation of so-called export-quality martyrs. In the state’s discursive linkage of transnational capital to heroism, Filipino Catholicized neoliberalism is operationalized as an affective space in which the generation of remittance capital is branded as a legitimate return on the Overseas Filipino Worker’s moral and ethical investments. In this scenario, the Roman Catholic institution exerts a distinct yet complementary form of governmentality. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork on Roman Catholic Passion rituals in the Philippines in focusing on two embodied arenas of labor power: (1) a labor brokerage regime in which transnational agents have been trained to externalize certain ethical and corporeal disciplines as forms of export capital; and (2) the self-mortifying body able to craft and sustain transnational agency through a renegotiation of the soteriological promise of Christian salvation.
Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 2014
This article juxtaposes two narrative accounts of ethnographic fieldwork on the Passion rituals o... more This article juxtaposes two narrative accounts of ethnographic fieldwork on the Passion rituals of Central Luzon in the Philippines. Framed from two distinct cultural and temporal contexts, these narratives highlight the limits and the possibilities of reflexive participant observation in understanding and depicting Filipino religious culture. The authors problematize the assumption that the researcher is the sovereign determinant of fieldwork parameters and local “informants” are merely complicit with the former’s empirical strategies. The act of witnessing, they argue, is a fluid process of exchange conditioned by the expectations and desires of the researcher’s interlocutors and the researcher’s own anxieties over the academic and personal prospects of his or her work.
This paper reflects upon the “life issues” of population growth and reproductive health in the Ph... more This paper reflects upon the “life issues” of population growth and reproductive health in the Philippines in the context of the ongoing congressional deliberation of House Bill 5043. Specific attention is paid to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church upon this process, through an analysis of the institutional pronouncements and edicts made by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP). It still remains to be seen whether HB5043 will be passed into law. What can be observed even at this stage, however, is that there may well be a discordance between Church proclamations regarding faith-based sexual morality on the one hand, and popular opinion and actual practices under difficult economic and social circumstances on the other. In this respect, sustainable population control in the Philippines continues to be an uphill battle, given the Church’s persistent association of artificial contraception with a pernicious “culture of death”.
Contemporary Islam, 2008
This paper discusses the extent to which Saba Mahmood's ideas about Muslim women and agency are r... more This paper discusses the extent to which Saba Mahmood's ideas about Muslim women and agency are relevant for works beyond her ethnographic speciality. The first part will reflect upon her arguments about Muslim female piety within the larger context of progressive politics in the USA and the Middle East. The second part will describe the implications of Mahmood's work towards the production of alternative discourses-that is, works inspired by and produced from outside the overarching influence of a Euro-American intellectual tradition.
The subject of this paper is the politics of ‘use’ and ‘misuse’ of religious iconography during p... more The subject of this paper is the politics of ‘use’ and ‘misuse’ of religious iconography during popular uprisings in the Philippines. It will discuss the ways in which religious icons,specifically the Santo Niño and Our Lady of EDSA, are co-opted for specific political and social agendas. “Rebellion” is broadly defined here as the combined action of a large group of people against what they see as the oppressive and hegemonic force that prevents the full enactment of their common interest. The concern here is to describe how mass action incorporates the imagery of divine personages so that revolutions are, simultaneously, acts of worship and rebellion. This paper asks the following question: What are the processes by which religious iconographies contextualise rebellion in the Philippines? What are the circumstances that led to a repetition of such events throughout the history of the country? And finally, under whose authority are rebellions and protests in the Philippines labelled and packaged as ‘holy’ and ‘divine’? This paper will argue that the ‘holiness’ of religiously inspired mass uprisings is contingent upon specific acts of legitimisation, ‘packaging’ and semantic contestation.
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Books by Julius Bautista
In this volume, contributors offer rich ethnographic analyses of religious practices in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Burma that examine the roles materiality plays in the religious lives of Southeast Asians. These essays demonstrate that religious materials are embedded in a host of practices that enable the faithful to negotiate the often tumultuous experience of living amid other believers. What we see is that the call for plurality, often initiated by government, increases the importance of religious objects, as they are the means by which the distinctiveness of a particular faith is “fenced” in a field of competing religious discourses. This project is called “the spirit of things” to evoke both the “aura” of religious objects and the power of material things to manifest “that which is fundamental” about faith and belief.
Contributors from diverse disciplinary and institutional backgrounds offer in-depth analyses of the complex interactions between Asian nation-states and Christianity in the context of modernisation and nation-building. Exploring the social and political ramifications of Christian conversions in Asia and their impact on state policies, the book analyses how Christian followers, missionaries, theologians and activists negotiate their public roles and identities vis-à-vis various forms of Asian states, particularly in the context of post-colonial nation-building and socio-economic development.
This volume represents a critical contribution to the existing scholarship on Christianity's global reach and its local manifestations, and demonstrates the significance of the Asian experience in our understanding of Christianity as a global religion.
Refereed Journal Articles by Julius Bautista