Philippinitis/ Puhon

2023, single channel video

total run time: 8:07

with Marietta Calleja-Baglieri and Pilar Calleja

The title of this video refers to the tropical neurasthenia that United States colonial forces in the Philippines developed during the time of their occupation of the (so-called) Philippine archipelago (1898-1940), called "philippinitis", and "puhon", a native Waray word meaning divine timing/ nature’s timing.

Despite the colonialists’ assumptions of themselves as masters of intellect and rulers over nature, land and body, this tropical condition subverted their efforts. By 1898, “philippinitis” was formally recognized in the American colonial medical literature. In their journals, officials blamed the unrelenting heat and humidity for the breakdown of their logic and order. Even those skeptical of the most extreme accounts of “philippinitis” came to admit that it would impact the United States’ “hopes for permanent White American control of the tropics.”

In my journey to (re)learn my mother’s tongue, Waray-Waray, I have contemplated our word “puhon”, which translates to nature’s/ divine timing. From rememberings that emerged collectively in a Waray- Waray language class organized by Bisayan artists and scholars, in Bisayan/ Waray cosmology, nature and the divine are one. Understanding a timing rooted in all nature as divine, this video frames this tropical malady as Earth's divine resistance to the extraction and pillaging of her lands. Puhon, then also suggests for me a divine moment of repair, rebalance and rememberance.

This speaks to the current moment, in which cultural bearers and artists of the archipelago and diaspora are remembering ancestral knowlege, wisdom and values somatically and through relations, often finding connection through technologies with roots in colonialism, such as social media. Despite the traumas inflicted upon our cultures and Earth, we find ways to connect and build- the divine works in mysterious ways- puhon.

This video is dedicated to my maternal grandmother Eva Apolinar Calleja of the island of Leyte and my great grandparents Nevart and Haig Dalalian of Diyarbakir, Anatolia. I thank my teachers Khokoi, Mang Firie and Raffy from Baba Bisaya for their generous language class offerings.

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1Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) 135-139.

Kim Maxime Baglieri

Kim Maxime Baglieri