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 “philippinitis”, the local name for 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) and puhon, a native Waray (ethnic group of the Philippine archipelago) word meaning divine timing/ nature’s timing.

Despite the American colonialists’ egocentric identifications of themselves as supreme agents of civilization, rulers over land and masters over body, “philippinitis” subverted these fantastical identifications. By 1898, “philippinitis” was formally recognized in the Americans’ colonial medical literature. In their journals, officials blamed the unrelenting heat and humidity for the breakdown of their logic and ethic. Colonel Major Charles E. Woodruff, M.D. wrote “Low tropical savages are the fittest for their environment, and the strenuous white man is the unfit.” 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 Waray, my mother’s tongue, I have contemplated the Waray word “puhon”, which translates to nature’s/ divine timing. From understandings that emerged collectively in a Waray language class organized by Bisayan artists and scholars, in this word nature and the divine are one. Using the poetics of a timing centered around nature-as-divine (all that is/ all that is of Earth and the Cosmos) my video frames “philippinitis” as nature’s divine intervention into the colonial-imperialist program of control and domination. Puhon, then also suggests for me a moment, the Embodied Sonic present, where Earth and its inhabitants enjoy joy and liberation in all of its diversity and wildness.

In this context, today’s era - wherein descendents from the archipelago are (re)discovering threads of their lineages through the body, through relations and through their languages; wherein these threads connect to web of ancestors, human, plant and animal kin, ritual, place-relations and cosmologies that the colonial- imperialist agenda was intent to destroy; and wherein to find each other these descendents use tools like the internet and social media that seemingly were born out of colonization- is an era that speaks directly to Puhon.

This work is part of a collection where I revere people, places and plant and animal kin that I am in close relation with via ancestry and roots (Leyte of so-called Philippines and Armenia/ Anatolia), or via refuge, settlement and nourishment (Lenapehoking, traditional homeland of the Lenape and Esopus Munsee people). 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 give thanks to my teachers Khokoi, Mang Firie and Raffy from the program Baba Bisaya for their generous language class offering and discussions that uncovered incredible richness of meaning and relation.

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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