This document discusses the need for partisan, people-centered scholarship in Philippine history to counter colonial distortions. It makes 3 key points: 1) Colonial historiography distorted history to justify colonization and suppress the role of the Filipino people. A nationalist viewpoint is needed to rectify these distortions. 2) Sources of distortion included colonial, clerical, and some Filipino scholars who viewed history through colonial frameworks. Partisan scholarship is essential to present the truths of the Filipino people. 3) History must be written from the viewpoint of the Filipino people to record their experiences and struggles, and judge events by how they affected the people's interests, not colonial rulers. This people-centered history can

1. History and
Partisan Scholarship

2. History has been used to capture our minds.
Outright forgery and falsification
Distortion of certain events.
The distorted history has been an important factor
in the development of our colonial consciousness
due to suppression of certain truths which would
have exposed the crass motivation of our
colonizers and of those Filipino collaborators who
lent their efforts toward making colonization easy to
accept.

3. Nationalist Framework
• Colonial consciousness made us believe that policies of
colonizers were really for our own good and not for their
own selfish designs.
• Philippine history is one arena in which we must struggle
to free our minds so that we may at last act in our best
interests.
• A nationalist viewpoint is therefore is an indispensable
prerequisite to the attainment of a liberating history. It
must constitute the ideological framework to which we
must all adhere.

4. • Nationalism endows us with a definite
point of view to alert us of possible
distortion which would affect our appraisal
of basic problems and might produce
misconceptions that will serve purposes of
colonial powers and ruling groups.
• Colonial scholarship affect the way we
think thus the need to counteract the
influence of colonial ideas and to rectify
the myths that have been presented and
accepted as reality.

5. Sources of Distortion
• Clerical scholars who saw the pre-spanish
Filipino through their christian prejudices and
categorized our indigenous societies in terms of
western social experience.
• Americans who represent themselves as
altruistic benefactors rather than conquerors
minimized if not concealed from generations of
Filipinos their cruelties by their army of
occupation and the resistance of the people.

6. Sources of Distortion
• Filipino historians have added their own
particular distortions by uncritically celebrating
heroes who ever fought the Americans and
idealized our pre-Spanish culture.
• Filipino historians who merely present a
compendium of historical data believing that
their objectivity exempts them from charges of
distortion, the result of that objectivity is in fact
distortion due to the weight of colonial
historiography.

7. Partisan Scholarship
• This is essential to counter the prevailing colonial
historiography.
• History should be in favor of our own development.
• Contrapose two sets of truths: The truth of the colonizers
and the truth of the people. Ex. Leaders of revolts as
bandits.
• Official history is written by the ruling class in its own
image. Propagandistic and narcissistic. Discounts the
participation of the inarticulate-the masses.
• Historians should project the people’s role and to
evaluate past events and the action of historical
personages in terms of how they affected the people.

8. Partisan Scholarship
• Cracks in the parchment curtain (Scott)
• Policies of the Spaniards due to resistance
of the Filipino people.

9. History of the Inarticulate
• 1872 events did not just sprout without
any antecedent causes.
• Filipino nationalism was not solely the
result of injustices. Economic factors
should also be considered.
• Trace to historical forces and the
emphasis should be shifted to responses
and reactions of those dismissed as a
passive population.

10. History of the Inarticulate
• We must examine all sides in the
formation of the culture and get more data
and insights into the life of our people.
• Letters, laws, may yield clues on the
history of the inarticulate.

11. The people’s Viewpoint
• The real history of the Philippines is a
version written from the vantage point of
the people.
• Record of the deeds of masses of people,
their experiences and growth.
• Judge historical events if it benefited the
people or for the selfish ends of a
transitory few.

12. The people’s Viewpoint
• History can be truly Filipino by writing on
the basis of the struggles of the Filipino
people.
• A truly Filipino history becomes a weapon
of a people who have to learn lessons
from the past in order to apply them to the
present so that they may act correctly to
secure the future.

13. The people’s Viewpoint
• A people’s history is one that combats and
defends, glorifies and condemns, criticizes
and advocates.

14. Dialectical Progressions
• Revolts must be presented as accretion of
consciousness, as praxis from which the
people may derive lessons and on the
basis of which theory may be formulated.
• The thought should spur patriotic students
of history to clarify the lessons of the past
so that they may help the people to build
up their defenses against future betrayals.

15. Dialectical Progressions
• History must do more than describe a
dead past – it must help us to understand
the roots of present phenomena so that
we may be able to project with some
degree of theoretical correctness the goals
of the future.
• It is not individuals who make history; it is
the people who are the makers of history.