Reading 3

Introduction

How do historians think? What makes historical inquiry intellectually exciting? If history is
representation of society’s collective memory, how could historians ensure that historical facts are
truthful and depictive of the genuine story and struggle of a people?

The foregoing questions are legitimate reasons for studying history. As non-history majors learning the
subject, it is compelling for everyone to know the nature and process of history-the investigations
involved in it as well as the personal biases of the historians. Like any human being, the historians are
“subjective” and free from errors. They use their own unique “frame of reference”, (experiences,
interests, loyalists, ideals, and belief systems) in interpreting the past. Although historians cannot escape
from using their own frame of reference, historical writing is not a matter of force fitting the historical
event to one or single frame of reference or a personal choice of historians. It has to factor in alternative
perspectives- from documents such as memoirs, eyewitnesses accounts, books, prayers, folk art, etc.
Significantly, historical inquiry is not totally shaped by a single frame of reference but of legitimate and
relevant evidences. The opinions of historians, no matter how strong they are, may not be accepted
unless they are supported by authentic and relevant evidences.

The following reading is focused on the method in history. It is an excerpt from John N. Schumacher’s
The Historian’s Tasks in the Philippines.it discusses the historian’s procedures in unravelling historical
truth. It also analyzes the development of historical writing especially that of nationalist history in the
country. More importantly, it presents the link and evolution between history writing and nationalism
through nationalist discourses of the past.

Learning Objectives

After reading the text, each student will be able to:

1. Explain the tasks of historians and the personal/professional qualities needed to realize these tasks;

2. Distinguish the emphasis of nationalist history from colonialist and elitist approaches in
historiography;

3. Identify Filipino historians and their writings which were falsified and distorted;

4. Discuss how attempts in writing a ‘nationalist’ history obstructed rather than promoted national
interest; and

5. Enumerate and discuss the characteristics of true “people” history.

Excerpt from “The Historian’s Task in the Philippines”

Method in History

Can history be objective? Obviously it is always written from a point of view. Documents are not self-
interpreting, and, therefore, need a human interpreter – the historian. Being human, he brings with him
not only his viewpoint, but also his biases and prejudices. The latter the historian should rid himself of,
once he recognizes them. Sadly, this is often not the case. But that is impossible to write without having
a point of view is certainly a truism.

Few historians today would maintain the nineteenth-century view that history is a science with laws as
rigorous as those of the physical sciences. But if “scientific history” in that sense is a myth, the valid use
of critical historical method is not. This method in its simplest terms, requires the historian to base
himself on documentation and to draw the evidence for his assertions or interpretations from the facts
found in documents. But not only what constitutes a “document” needs definition. Arriving at the
“facts” demands that the historian should demonstrate in detail how he bridges the gap between the
documentation and the conclusions he draws from it. If that is so done that other historians are able to
verify this process, we can speak of scientific method through reasoned disagreement may exist on the
evaluation of the evidence or even its selection.

“Documents”, on the other hand, need not be limited to those emanating from government offices or
even to memoirs and letters. Other types of documents, though not relating “historical facts”, tell us
much about the facts of people’s ways of thinking or their perceptions of reality. These include literary
works, books of prayers, even folk art. Since such “documents” are even self-interpreting than the more
conventional ones, their successful use depends even more on the historian’s ability to put the proper
questions to them. Though historians may argue about the technicalities of determining the exact
meaning of such manifestations of popular thinking and values, Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution
and other writings have demonstrated that such “documents” are a fruitful source for the historian.

It is in knowing how to put questions to a document and knowing what questions to put that the
historian’s point of view makes a difference. One may be convinced that religion is irrelevant to life.
Thus, he will not put to his documentation the questions which might reveal that religious values are
stronger than economic factors in moving people to revolutionary action. Another who sees religious
movements. By the same token, a historian’s nationalist commitment, if not too narrowly conceived,
ought to make him put new questions to the past. History never delivers ready-made answers. But the
historian’s questions may shed new light on his people’s problems of the present.

Nationalist History

In one sense, writing history from a nationalist point of view is to be expected from every Filipino
historian whom loves his country. Indeed, why should he bother to research into his country’s history
except for the belief that a more profound and exact knowledge of the past will help to build the future?
But various types of “nationalist history” have obstructed, instead of promoted, the national cause.

The prototype of all these was eccentric and ingenious lucubration of Pedro Paterno at the turn of the
century on the supposed pre-Hispanic past. He tried to show that everything good that he found in
nineteenth-century Filipino society, even Christianity itself, was the fruit of some mythical inborn
qualities of the rare and had existed before the coming of the Spaniards. Contemporary Filipinos like
Rizal, of course, laughed privately at Paterno’s so called history. Unfortunately, his books were not
without influence on later textbook writers.

Paterno distorted genuine documents. But more harmful were the early twentieth-century forgeries of
Jose Marco on Pre- Hispanic Philippines, the Povendo and Pavon manuscripts, with the infamous Code
of Kalantiaw. These products of perversely creative imagination were not only accepted but also
commended on by respectable American and Filipino historians. The so-called Code of Kalantiyaw, in
particular, found its way into history textbooks for generations until it was exposed in 1968 by William
Henry Scott in his Prehispanic Sources for the History of the Philippines. This, however, did not prevent a
popular college textbook from republishing the code in the 1970s, even while adverting to its dubious
(better said, non-existent) authenticity. Nor did it prevent older studies based on Marco’s psedohistory
from being republished in 1979, thus perpetuating further the distortion of the pre-Hispanic past.

Not satisfied with having provided a spurious national past for the pre-Hispanic period, Marco also
wrote a series of supposed works of Fr. Jose Burgos. Among these were the pseudonovel, La Loba Negra
an alleged account of Burgo’s trial, and more than two dozen a, other pseudo historical and pseudo
ethnographic works, all furnished with forged signatures of Burgos. Though the first Burgos forgeries
were already questioned before the war, these mixtures of undigested misinformation and anti-Catholic
dia tribes continued to be manufactured and published until shortly before the death of Marco. What is
sadder for Philippine historiography is that even after I published in 1970 a detailed exposure of the
forgeries, including photographs of the true and forged signatures, these falsifications of the beginnings
of the nationalist struggle continue to be used as if genuine.

Such attempts to make history “nationalist” as those of Paterno and Marco, and their perpetuators, are
clearly futile. Reconstructing a Filipino past, however glorious in appearance, on false pretenses can do
nothing to build a sense of national identity, much less offer guidance for the present of or the future.
More persuasive, at least at first glance, has been the “nationalist’s history” of the 1970’s. The latter
rightly rejects the colonialist and elitist approaches to national history. But it likewise finds inadequate
“objective” studies of recent professional historians because these allegedly do not involve themselves
in the total effort to free the Filipino from his colonial mentality. A truly Filipino history, it is said, cannot
but be a history of the Filipino masses and their struggles. Those struggles have been carried on against
Spanish to oppression and American exploitation, colonial and neo-colonial,. They continue against the
dominant classes of Filipinos who collaborate in the imperialist exploitation.