Sociological Perspectives in the Study of Philippine Popular Culture Ricardo G.Abad glance at the titles of the conference papers reveals two trends in A‘ contemporary study of popular culture: the variety of academic disciplines, notably literature and the social sciences, that are brought to bear on the topic. I am slightly disappointed, however, that few of the papers come from social scientists, and that few Filipino sociologists—as evidenced, at least, from the pages of the Philippine Sociological Review—spend enough time to reflect on the state of Philippine popular culture. Specifically, I wish to show, in a general way, how three major sociological perspectives—the consensus, conflict, and interpretative frameworks—illumine our understanding of Philippine popular culture. I shall start with the matter of definition, then proceed to a discussion of theoretical perspectives, and conclude with a few issues that deserve attention in future studies. Problems of Definition While the distinction between popular culture and such related concepts as “folle culture,” “mass culture,” and “elite culture” are fairly clear in the sociological literature (Lewis 1978, Kando 1980, Hess and others 1986), there is still no agreement on the basic definition of the term “popular culture.” The available definitions include the statistical, where the adjective “popular” is viewed in terms of quantitative indicators such as television ratings, records sales and box-office receipts; the elitist, which relegates popular culture to low art; and the political, where popular culture, following McCabe (1986), is seen either as mass forms of entertainment designed to legitimize the ruling ideas of society (the pessimist view), or a creative outlet for the working class to oppose the dominant bourgeois culture (the optimist view). Varied as these definitions are, they all share a tendency to treat audiences as a homogencous, undifferentiated mass—a statistical aggregate, an unsophisticated lot, a gullible collective, ot a force de la=a resistance, Other difficulties abound. The statistical definition also cartes with it the ring of arbitrariness: what should be the cut-off point, for example, in sales or box-office receipts before something is labelled “popular?” In curn, che elitist definition applies the standard of high ar to products that were not designed ro be such art but as forms of recteation of entertainment. The same definition also tends to belittle the masses for not having greater intellectual abilities or for not leading a more intellectual life. For its part, the political definition—both the pessimist and the optimist varieties—attaches a specific theoretical color for their analysis and locks out alternative and possibly useful 14 Ricardo G Abad interpretations. ‘What seems useful in further studies of popular culture is a commitment, to quote McCabe (1986:8), “to break with any and all of the formulations which depend on a high/low, elite/mass distinetion,” and to pay greater attention to “the complex ways in which traditions and technologies combine to prodiice audiences (:bid).” For this reason, it might be helpful to start with a broad, although tentative, definition that will permit a greater play of theoretical perspectives. The Journal of Popular Culture (1981) offers a simple definition: popular culeure are products designed for mass consumption. While the definition is still incomplete—the kinds of products, for instance, are not specified —itis sufficiently broad to cover the diversity of topics covered by the study of popular culture, from Wakasan Komiks to adidas (the chicken fect and the sneaker), and sufficiently laidback to give proponents of various theoretical persuasions their curn at the interpretative bat. In a field like sociology, where practitioners operate without a dominant paradigm, it is an occupational imperative to heed other points of view. Sociological Perspectives on Popular Culture : “The backbone of al sociological perspectives rests on what C. Wright Mills (1959) calls the “sociological imagination,” or the ability © the connection between biography and history, between private lives or to borrow Berger and Luckmann's (1967) elegant phrasing: os comprehend the dialectic between personal identity and social steuctut® In the study of popular culture, the sociological imagination isthe abi!Sociological Perspectives in the Study of Philippine Popular Culture 15 to decipher the interconnections between products, behavior, and context. Or in words that would thrill positivistic sociologists, popular culture may be seen as an independent variable, the causative agent, for example, in the formation ofa specific kind of gender consciousness; or as a dependent variable, the resulting product, say the zarzuel, wi arose from a given set of socioeconomic, political conditions; or an intervening variable, the facilitating factor that helps, for example, keep the people subservient to the interest of the ruling class. Either way, positivistic or not, the sociological interest in popular culture always centers on the context and meaning of a cultural product for the audience. Three sociological perspectives illustrate this interest. Consensus Perspective. The consensus perspective looks at popular culture in terms of its ability to enhance the stability or solidarity of a social system, One expression of this ability is the manner in which forms of popular culture—the mass media, for example—provide the pause that refieshes weary workers. To paraphrase German Moreno in a television interview, “Marami na tayong mga problema. Kung hindi tayo makapaghigay ng entertainment, lalong lalala ang mga problema natin.” ‘A second expression of the consensus perspective is popular culture’s ability to transmit values, images, and norms that legitimize existing patterns of thought and action, or to create new values, images, or norms consistent with a particular social order. Thus, an analyst using the consensus perspective would conclude that part of the appeal of such television programs as “Lovingly Yours, Helen” or “Stop: Child Abuse” lies in the “moral lessons” provided by these serials: what it means to be a good child, a good parent, or a good friend—lessons that appear to be more effectively taught by television than by priestly pontifications from the pulpit, The same analyst, observing the ardent fans of Vilma, Nora, and Maricel, will see these celebrities as role models who grant their followers, mostly the working class, some access to an otherwise unavailable privileged world. Still the same analyst charting the images may see a reinforcement of traditional female roles, or the fostering of new ones to meet the demands of an urbanizing society. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, for consensus-inspired analysts to make a logical leap from16 Ricardo G. Abad these observations and see popular culture as products that can Create, even symbolically, unifying values and atticudes in large, heterogeneou, societies. Gocthads (1981) illustrates this point: despite class and Tacial divisions in American society, the World Series and the Super Bowl games help bring Americans together. Can the same be said of the PBA games or the victory of the Filipino candidate in a Miss Universe pageang? Or do we still need to engage in what Eric San Juan (1988) calls “symbolic activism” to find a cultural product that will help bind us as a nation? “Trust the consensus theorists to identify those common symbols when they surface from Philippine culture. Trust them, too, to pinpoint those manifestations of popular culture that are perceived to threaten the stability and solidarity of the social order. The hullabaloo over sex, violence, and the misuse of language on television are cases in point. By themselves, Carmi Martin's tanga, Voltes V's death machine, or Jimmy Santos’ warped mastery of the English language are mere devices to entertain audiences. Seen from the perches of some sectors of decent society, however, these devices must be eliminated since they seriously violate norms of propriety, corrupt young people's minds, or teach the wrong values. In sum, the consensus perspective views societies as systems striving to reach the pink of social health—however that social health is defined. Elements of popular culture that contribute to this health are supported and maintained; those that weaken this health are subject co control, including, as it may, the wrath of the censor’s chief or moral entrepreneurs of the same ilk. Conflict Perspective. Consensus theorists see the social system as striving toward stability or equilibrium. Conflict theorists, in contrast, see that same system as an arena of struggle, a competition for scarce resources where the victors, having gained status and control, seek to maintain their position in the social hierarchy. Popular culture, because it represents profit, power and privilege, comprises one of those scarce resources. For this reason, the central question for conflict theorists is not how popular culture serves to stabilize the system, but how populat culture is produced and reproduced to serve the interest of specific groups. To quote Real (1975: 257), who echoes Marx, “popular cultureSociological Perspectives in the Study of Philippine Popular Culture 17 primarily serves the interests of the relatively small political-economic power elite that sits at the top of the social pyramid.” Lumbera (1980) makes a si claim: Contrary to the implications of the word “popular,” popular culture is not created by the populace. Rather itis a culture created cither by the ruling elite or by members of the intelligentsia in the employ of that elite for the consumption of the populace. Three issues underlie the conflict perspective. The first relates to the concept of “ideological hegemony” (Gramsci, 1959), or the control over cultural objects and symbols. Stated formally, those at the apex of power and property hierarchies not only pass their high status to their offsprings, but because these people control the educational system, the religious institutions, and the mass media, their view of the world also becomes accepted as truth. Elements of popular culture are thus socially constructed. Some people and groups decide what is made and for whom, as well as what vision of the world is portrayed in them. Popular culture is thus manufactured like any other product: to legitimize the interests of the ruling class. Given this perspective, it is important to ask, who are the artists and entertainers? Who pays them? Who are the creators of these products? Who consumes these products? And who benefits from the production and consumption of these products? The second issue highlights another form of control: who defines what is real or good, and when does the word “good” mean “what we think is good for you?” This form of control is the task of “gatekeepers,” agents, promoters and makers of taste—particular people whose social position permits them to impose their standard of goodness, or to open or close the gates of the success ofa cultural product. Mother Lily, Kuya Germs, and Ate Luds produce shows which, in their minds, the public wants. They are aided in this task by a large supporting cast of movie scribes, gossip columnists, and press agents, Sometimes their shows become successful at the box office and sometimes they do not, all of ‘which prove that the masses can accept or reject the products offered them. True, but only to an extent, and within limits. The choices available18 Ricardo G. Abad at any given time may only be berseen Starzanand Gawe ne ang Belong Papatay sa lyo. This control can also come in subtler ways, Following Marg proposition about religion being an opium of the people, confi, theorists also see popular culture as a social narcotic: a mechanism «4 numb minds to the harsh and problematic aspects of social life, r ay instrument to generate illusions that do not correspond to the realtie of everyday life. In their study of how the Philippine mass media creare and sustain illusions about poverty, for example, Laura Samson and others (1977: 142) note: Sa pilosopiyang pinalalaganap ng mass media mapapansin ang diin sa kahalagahan ng simpleng pamumuhay. Ang kahirapan naman daw ay hindi ganoong kasama, mayroon ding kabutihan ang pagiging mahirap. Ang kailangan lamang ay bawasan ang inggit, magpakababang-loob, umasa at kumilos nang ayon sa mga ipinag-uutos ng lipunan, Renato Constantino (1985: 36) addresses the same issue when he talks about the “standardization” of popular culture that - provides the dominant classes with happy, exploited people whose minds are sedated with entertainment. .. that distort reality and ignore the basic problems of society. At the other end of the spectrum are the stores of sex and violence. . .. which brutalize and desensitize and hardly provide useful insights because the emphasis is on individualistic solutions. . . The recurring image appears: individuals are without relation to society, a hero—be it Panday or Pepeng Kuryente—fights the forces of evil as an individual. It cannot be otherwise: the oppressed classes are fragmented, or at least unaware of their status, and the hero must take it upon himself to avenge the foul deed. He is always successful, proving time and time again that individual solutions, which usually spring from individual problems, are better than collective action, The recurting image is typical in Filipino action films, but is not uniquely Filipine- Indeed, this image or vision underscores our dependence on First Wotl‘Sociological Perspectives in the Study of Philippine Popular Culeure 19 mass media. As Constantino (1985: 37) suggests, this vision of the world is “facilitated by the fact that Third World audiences have been reduced to passive recipients of information from information monopolies. We have absorbed a Hollywood ethos and made it our own.” Class and class inequalities are thus among the central concepts used by conflict theorists in their analysis of popular culture. And properly so, considering the strong correlations between socioeconomic | status and access to the use of media (Abad, 1981), as well as between | people’ taste for high or low culture and their level of education (Gans, 1974). But the issue for conflict theorists lies beyond these correlations: it rests rather on the ways in which culture produces and reinforces class inequalities and, in the process, legitimizes the ideas of the dominant class. The text, therefore, does not reflect the lives, needs, and desires of the masses but of an elite who seek to control people’s minds (Marcuse, 1964) Yer despite these views, conflict theorists see some expressions of popular culture as a means of opposing the established order. Thus, a third issue for the conflict perspective concerns the ways in which an | “quthentic” popular culture can emerge from the daily experience of the people rather than being imposed on them by others. Constantino (1985:37) cites the Chilean case: under Salvador Allende’s government, Chilean musicians had rediscovered indigenous music and developed it to express the people's sentiments and aspirations. In response, the generals arrested and killed the artists to silence their music. Similarly, Gimenez-Maceda (1980) finds social criticism and social protest in the songs of Freddie Aguilar, Heber Bartolome, and Jesus Manuel Santiago. To these artists, as well as to conflict theorists in general, nothing short of drastic change is necessary to eradicate class inequalities and ideological hegemony, and in so doing promote an authentic popular culture. Interpretative Theories. Interpretative theories in sociology—and these include such frameworks as symbolic interactionism, dramaturgy, structuralism and phenomenology—deal with the ways in which peopl define and make sense of the situations they experience in their ever life, whereas consensus and conflict theorists address the macro\ of systems and of meanings and face-to-face interac20 Ricardo G. Abad phenomenologists, for example, the topic of interest isnot so much ae reality “out there”, so to speak, but the way in which that reality perceived, accepted, and internalized by the people in society In this view; the images or themes found in popular culture are not somethin imposed from the outside but are located in the mind. They represen, a shared set of meanings that is constantly created and recreated in everyday life—in short, they represent a “negotiated order” of social reality Few studies of popular culture have made use of interpretative frameworks. Among these are works that, following the structural theories of Levi-Strauss and Barthes, seek to identify an underlying structure of meaning in such cultural products as Western films and comic strips (see Kress, 1975, for a review of these works.) A related set of works, taking off from Bourdieu’s (1973) concept of culture codes, argues that embedded in these culeural products are symbolic codes that make sense only to those socialized in these codes. These studies are important, but there stil remains the interpretative task of asking whether or not the meanings or symbols found in these cultural products “act back” on the audience. The concern here is not so much with “audience effect” or “audience impact,” the stuff of many mass- communication researches (sce Lewis, 1978: 50-56 for an overview), but the way in which the insights from textual analysis conflate with the people’s perceptions of the world. Is there a “symmetry of perspectives,” to use Berger and Luckmana’s notion as an example, between che meaning obscrved in the product and the people's (or audience's) world-view? Is there a “symmetry of perspectives” between what the cultural gatekeepers perceive entertainment with what the so-called bakya crowd consider a8 entertainment? It is one thing to say, as Tiongson (1977) does, that the value “mabuti ang inaapi” cuns through many Filipino dramas and movies, and quite another to link this insight with systematic data on People’s perceptions of suffering, or echoing Marcuse (1964), to show thar this value does not reflect people's sentiments but that of powerful film producers who seek to reinforce people's complacency to social action. Likewise, to many contemporary gatekeepers, Hamlet hardly qualifies as entertainment fare. Yet, as Hilarion Henares, who brought his household help to watch a Teatro Pilipino production of Hams audSociological Perspectives in the Study of Philippine Popular Culture 21 wrote in his column (1987): “They enjoyed Shakespeare with the same rambunctious pleasure the Elizabethan audiences must have felt 400 years ago. And I enjoyed with them. So did busloads of students from the provinces.” Two recent works, while not directly studies on popular culture, further illustrate the possible uses of interpretative theories in studies of popular culture. One is Vicente Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1988). The other is Raul Pertierra’s Religion, Politics, and Rationality: Social Transformation in an locos Community (1988). In general, Rafael contends chat in the process of Christian conversion, something got lost in the translation from Spanish to Tagalog. In effect, the Filipinos’ acceptance of Catholicism was, in Rafael’s words, “contracted”: it was based not so much on what the Spaniards understood to be Catholic, but on how the Filipinos, as non- Spanish speakers, understood what the friars were trying to say. No wonder that despite three centuries of Spanish rule, a great deal of contemporary Filipino religiosity exhibits the folk ethos. No wonder, too, as Zialcita (1988) observes, despite the proliferation of churches in the Ilocos, Iocanos have a non-Catholic conception of “sin” and no conception of “hell” at all Raul Pertierra stresses a similar point. Why, he asks, are certain areas of social life resistant to outside influences while others are not? To be more specific: why is it that certain disputes are settled along customary lines, and others are brought before the courts? Why is it that barrio children spend a lot of time learning the latest dance steps, but avoid a similar display of dance moves at public gatherings? Pertierra finds the answer in Habermas's concept of “communicative rationality,” a kind of understanding that achieves maximum results only under conditions of unrestricted discourse. Had formal court proceedings been more explicable, more predictable, and less expensive, barrio residents would continue to rely on them exclusively. Because they are not, they are replaced by (or made to co-exist with) a more customary procedure that ensures the active participation of all parties under conditions of discourse that are more likely co artive at a mutually satisfactory understanding, Similarly, had the latest dance step been more consistent _7 with traditional norms, they would be more widely used. But since these steps go against established understanding of appropiate behavio, for young boys and girls, their displays are limited only to schoo) programs. In either case, an external idea has been recontextualized and situationally bounded, made to suit the Hocano’s everyday life. These works suggest that it may be misleading to assume a symmetry of perspectives between text and audience, or between the producer's and consumer's notions of entertainment. Popular culture does not necessarily imitate life and vice-versa. The symmetry of perspective, op the negotiated order, must first be established. To paraphrase Homans (1950), che task of interpretative theories is to “bring the men and women back in,” and in the study of popular culture, this meansa confrontation with the actors involved in the production, reproduction, and consumption of a cultural product. } | 22 Ricardo G. Abad Issues for Analysis Let me close this paper with three broad issues for future studies of Philippine popular culture: 1. eis futile, ae this point, to reconcile the three major sociological perspectives in the study of popular culture. While some integration of related theories is welcome (e.g., di Maggio, cited in Lewis, 1978: 43-45), it might be more useful to ask questions about certain aspects of popular culture and to pursue answers, given the available armory of theoretical concepts while realizing at the same time the limitations of each perspective. Further thinking on the relationship between the product and the audience is one topic that can be pursued this regard, 4 In the spirit of sociology’s “debunking motif” (Berger, 1 researchers can also assess common assumptions regardit nature of popular culture. Abdul Majid bin Nabi Baksh’s defense of popular art from various criticisms levelled it is one example. But other notions require more examination. Does popular culture really sedate people problems? Do cultural entrepreneurs really wiSociological Perspectives in the Study of Philippine Popular Culture 23 culture really authentic? Is the so-called mass audience an undifferentiated whole? 3. Italso appears useful to establish a stronger connection between the sociological/anthropological tradition in the study of popular culture. Sociologists and anthropologists are experts in the study of human behavior but they are only starting to grapple with the understanding of texts. Students of literature have mastered the cext but they are just beginning to branch ‘out to the study of social behavior. A greater communion of both traditions may prove fruitful for future studies. In one of her essays on the Philippine komiks, Soledad S. Reyes (1980) concludes that the Aomifs will thrive and transform itself as long as it continues to reflect the collective reality ofthe Philippines. So will other cultural products designed for mass consumption. Philippine popular culture is a Filipino social construction. Understanding its forms and dynamics will offer insights into Philippine society and culture. We are not simply reading Hiwaga Komiks, viewing Regal Drama Specials listening to Rafael Yabut, or gazing ata painting of an idyllic rural scene in a gallery located in the tourist belt. We are understanding ourselves. To paraphrase Leo Lowenthal (1961), a pioneer in the sociological study of popular culture: much about a society and the personalities of those residing in it can be learned by a systematic study of the literature and popular culture produced and consumed by that society References ‘Abad, Ricardo. Reading Habits of Filipinos in Three Philippine Cisies: UNESCO Survey. A Final Report. Quezon City: Institute of Pt Culture, 1981 Baksh, Abdul Majid bin Nabi. The Popular Culture Controversy. Penang: Research Publications, 1983. Barbu, Zev. “The Politics of Popular Culture,” in Approaches to Popular Culture, Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1976. Berger, Peter. Invitation to Sociology. New York: Doubleday Anchor Bourdieu, Pierre. “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” Brown (ed.), Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change. Tavistock, 1973.