Department of History, National University of Singapore

Response to Fr. John Schumacher's Review of "Contracting Colonialism"

Author(s): Vincente L. Rafael
Source: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 272-273
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Department of History, National
University of Singapore
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20071188
Accessed: 05/01/2010 23:30

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Cambridge University Press and Department of History, National University of Singapore are collaborating
with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.

http://www.jstor.org
Responses

Response to Fr. John Schumacher's review of Contracting Colonialism. Ithaca and

London: Cornell University Press, 1988 [Journal of Southeast Asian Studies XX,
no. 2 (September 1989): 354-55].

John Schumacher's review of my book is admirable for its honesty. He admits to

being biased toward both its approach and its arguments, yet he evades any discus
sion of method and instead isolates what he thinks are 'key objects of analysis'. In
other words, Fr. Schumacher has decided to let his biases guide his reading of the
book rather than enter into a dialogue with it. He thus sets out to discount the
possibility of taking the book on its own terms and rejects outright different con
notations of such notions as 'power', 'subjugation', 'conversion' and 'translation' as
these might have appeared among Spaniards and Tagalogs in the early period of
colonial rule. Instead, he reads the book in terms of his own expectations and pre
judices. In this sense, he is in a position analogous to that of the Spanish friars who
read Tagalog culture and language in terms of their own ideas about culture and
signification. I find it ironic then that the trajectory of his review should echo the
situation I describe inmy book where a colonial-Christian order emerges despite and
because of the instigation and institutionalization of certain modes of understanding,
or better yet, misunderstanding between Spaniards and Tagalogs.
The 'key objects' that Fr. Schumacher focuses on deal for the most part with the
actions and writings of Spanish missionaries that are taken up in roughly half of the
book (part of the Introduction, Chapters 1, 3, 5). The review thus ignores the other
half of the book (Introduction, Chapters 2, 4, 6 and the Afterword) which deals with
the history and modalities of Tagalog response to evangelization. These chapters on
Tagalog responses are in fact the heart of the book. By paying close attention to
largely ignored documents in Tagalog for what these have to say about grammar,
conversion, paradise and death, I have sought to write a history of native conversion
that seriously takes into account the manner by which events were perceived and
articulated by those at the lower rung of the colonial hierarchy. But Schumacher
discounts all this by sheer omission. He is far more concerned with defending evan
gelization as such. Yet, his defense is as inconsistent as it is uncalled for. In the first
at no do I cast ? or ? on
place, point judgement moral otherwise missionary
activities in the Philippines. My interest is more modest: that of reconstructing
Spanish notionsregarding the link between the epistemology and rhetoric of con
version. Again Schumacher misreads things. He claims that I 'insist on the ...
inextricable relationship' between Church and State in colonial Philippines. Regardless
of how individual missionaries in the sixteenth century may have felt about the
matter, the historical record speaks of the connection repeatedly, from the Royal
Patronage of the Church to the reframing of the Laws of the Indies to coincide

272
Responses 273

with the project of evangelization (see Chapters 3 and 5). Indeed, I argue that the
numerous conflicts between Church and State merely reaffirmed a colonial ideology
which persistently upheld the priority of subjugation by evangelization over conquest
by sheer political and military force.
Hence, Schumacher's criticism of my discussion of confession is completely off
the mark. I never suggested that confession was a way of delivering errant natives
to the power of the state, as he seems to imply. Rather, confession was a means
of 'conquering' the disposition of native converts by reshaping their desires and
behaviour to accord with missionary precepts. Had Fr. Schumacher reread the first
page of my preface, he would have gotten a more nuanced sense of what I meant
by conversion as a form of subjugation. Far from making the crude suggestion that
priests and bureaucrats conspired to use confession as a way of 'overpowering' the
native converts, I in fact argue that confession became an important site for nego
tiating the differences between missionary assumptions and native interest. For
this reason, I spend an entire chapter discussing the struggle over definitions of the
terms of reciprocal obligation in the context of conversion. Schumacher ignores this
crucial section (Chapter 4) and so misses out on the contractual nature of conversion
with which I am concerned.
It is dismaying that he ends up fixated instead on my
discussion of the sixth commandment. (So what if I don't mention the European
antecedents of confessional manuals? What difference would it have made to my argu
ment to say that such detailed questioning had been common in medieval Europe?
My points was that itwas certainly most uncommon in early Tagalog colonial society.)
Here, it is a case of mistaking a tree for the forest. It is perhaps this highly selective
attention to 'key objects of analysis' that leads Schumacher to the astonishingly
apologetic conclusion that confession 'had nothing to do with the domination of a
colonized people'.
In closing, Schumacher charges me with being ahistorical because 'lines of evi
dence, as selections meant for new converts in the sixteenth century are mingled with
those dating 200 years later'. The point of beginning with Rizal's 1886 novel was to
show how his description of Tagalog conversion is symptomatic of a more widespread
historical phenomenon often mentioned but never fully discussed by historians who
have written about colonial Philipine societies. This is neither a question of 'literary
artifice' nor 'poststructuralism'; it is simply a way of approaching the genealogy of
an event ? Tagalog conversion ? in ways that seriously engage what native converts
themselves had to say in the vernacular about the matter. Thus did I hope to reopen
the crucial question of religion, colonial ideology and the terms of native submission
and resistance to these Unfortunately, Fr. Schumacher, a scholar of considerable
stature and seniority, has chosen to patronize my efforts as 'clever' and 'ahistorical'.
Rather than attend to the Tagalog documents which I write about, he has chosen to
listen only to the missionary version of events, a version that draws its sanction from
a Law that regards itself to be finally and fatally beyond all human history, where
human history is reduced as a function of theology. In this sense, one is led to
wonder who is being ahistorical.

University of California, San Diego Vincente L. Rafael