South East Asia Research

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Bisayan studies

Resil B. Mojares

To cite this article: Resil B. Mojares (2023) Bisayan studies, South East Asia Research, 31:3,
223-231, DOI: 10.1080/0967828X.2023.2259164
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SOUTH EAST ASIA RESEARCH
2023, VOL. 31, NO. 3, 223–231
https://doi.org/10.1080/0967828X.2023.2259164

STATE OF THE FIELD

Bisayan studies
Resil B. Mojares
University of San Carlos, Cebu City, Philippines

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay briefly introduces Bisayan studies as a field of academic Visayas; Philippines;
research, with a focus on literature and history. It outlines the Philippines; regional identity
designation of the Visayas as a distinct region by Spanish
colonizers, despite linguistic diversity, and the development over
the following centuries of a collective regional identity. It
describes a shift in scholarly interests towards local culture and
history in the 1970s that saw the creation of regional study
centres in the Philippines. Finally, it provides a survey of the
current state of the field, suggesting future avenues for research.

I shall begin this brief introduction to Bisayan studies with a few words about the notion
of the Visayas as a geographic and cultural region, then dwell on the state of the field of
Bisayan studies, and finally close with some thoughts on directions that can be taken in
this field.
A word of uncertain etymology, ‘Bisaya’ was well established as a designation for the
peoples, languages and territory of what is now the Visayas by the seventeenth century, a
few decades after the onset of Spanish colonization in 1565, when the Spaniards started to
explore the archipelago.1 Early Europeans also referred to the region with the more col-
ourful title of Islas de los Pintados (‘islands of the painted’) due to its inhabitants’ practice
of tattooing. However, this appellation did not last long because tattooing was not
peculiar to the Visayas but was a practice fairly well diffused in the archipelago.
The fact that it was imagined as a distinct region was enabled by the fact that the
Visayas do constitute a definably distinct physical formation, being a group of islands
in central Philippines, clustered in the Visayan Sea between the big islands of Luzon
and Mindanao, thus forming the country’s tripartite geographic division into Luzon,
Visayas and Mindanao.

CONTACT Resil B. Mojares mojares.resil@gmail.com

1
Etymologies range from the seventeenth-century Jesuit Francisco Alcina’s explanation that it comes from the Bisayan
saya or sadya and the Sanskrit visaya, ‘pleasure of sense’, suggesting a person or people ‘happy, of fine disposition,
fun-loving’, to the theses that the word derives the Sanskrit Vijaya and Malay Wijaya, meaning ‘victory, victorious’;
the Peninsular Malay’s sahaya or saya, meaning ‘slave’, which may be the origin of the Maranao and Tausug’s use
of Bisaya, meaning ‘slave’ or the territory where slaves are captured. There is also the nebulous connection H. Otley
Beyer and Gregorio Zaide draw between the name Bisaya and Sri Vijaya, to support the thesis that the Philippines
was once part of this Sumatra-based empire. It is speculated that the word is of Sanskrit origin and means ‘dominion,
territory, country’, thus referring to the Visayas as a ‘remnant’ (visaya) of Sri Vijaya, or that it means ‘victorious’ (wijaya),
meaning that it is a region successfully subjugated by Sri Vijaya. See Carroll (1960), Baumgartner (1974) and Rausa-
Gomez (1967).
© 2023 SOAS University of London
224 R. B. MOJARES

Beyond physical geography, geographers also say that ‘considerable homogeneity

exists [among the Visayan islands] by virtue of location, proximity to each other,
geology, climatology, history, and ethnolinguistic characteristics’ (Wernstedt and
Spencer 1967, 445). Yet, the Visayas is also undeniably a region of considerable diversity,
marked by a plurality of languages, politico-administrative affiliations and cultural-
linguistic groupings. The Visayas has never existed as a single political or administrative
unit, with the exception of ephemeral, ineffectual attempts by Spanish and American
colonial governments to demarcate it as a single administrative or military district.
The Visayas consists of four geographic subregions: eastern, central, western, and
northern. Northern Visayas (Masbate, Romblon, Burias and Ticao) lies in a transitional
position between Luzon and the other Visayan islands and may be more oriented north-
ward than southward. (To travel from Cebu to Romblon today, for instance, one has to
go the roundabout way to Manila and then take a boat to Romblon.)
Linguistically, the Visayas is very diverse. What linguists call the North Bisayan
languages (Hiligaynon, Aklanon, Kinaray-a) may be more closely related to Tagalog
and the Bikol languages than they are to Cebuano, while the South Bisayan languages
(like Cebuano) may be closer to the East Mindanao languages (Surigaonon, Butuanon,
Tausug) than to some languages in the Visayas (see MacFarland 1981).2
However, a shared Mediterranean-type environment, similar historical experiences,
economic contact, and the circulation of people within the region – particularly in the
central, eastern and western subregions – have fostered a sense of collectivity, of being
Bisaya, in addition to the more localized identities of being Boholano, Waray,
Cebuano or Ilonggo.
This collective identity has been stimulated by its utility in Philippine identity politics.
Since the first Philippine Republic in 1898, federalist sentiments have been pronounced.
As Filipinos struggled to form an independent government at the close of the nineteenth
century, many Filipino leaders favoured a federal system that would divide the country
from three into eleven regions or states.3 Knowing that the sense of ‘nation’ was inchoate
and had to be built from the ground up, a federal system must have seemed the most
feasible and practical option. The Aguinaldo government, however, convinced of the
need for strong central powers to prosecute a war that was ongoing (first against
Spain and then against the United States), opted for the unitary system that continues
to this day. With continuing national–local tensions, however, the idea of a federalized
or decentralized structure of government has persisted until now.4
Regional identities have remained a strong factor in Philippine political culture. This
was particularly so in the post-dictatorship era after 1986 when anti-centralist sentiments
were strong, as shown in the popular expression Bisayang Daku (‘Big Bisayan’ or ‘big on

2
Of the seven major indigenous Philippine languages, three are Bisayan (Cebuano, Hiligaynon and Leyte-Samar).
3
In 1898, when the Aguinaldo government had not yet established its presence in the Visayas, leaders in Iloilo took the
initiative to form the ‘Federal State of the Visayas’, anticipating the formation of a Federal Republic with three states,
Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. Independent of this move, a draft constitution for the Federal Republic was presented by
Mariano Ponce to Aguinaldo in 1898, and in 1899 a group of prominent Filipinos also submitted to the US–Philippine
Commission a draft constitution for a ‘Federal Republic of the Philippines’ with eleven regions or states. In 1900, Isabelo
de los Reyes also published a proposal for a federal constitution that would divide the country into seven states.
4
In a government reorganization in 1971, President Marcos divided the country into administrative regions, dividing the
Visayas into Regions VI (Eastern Visayas), VII (Central Visayas), and VIII (Western Visayas). Romblon was joined to
Mindoro and Palawan as Region IV, while Masbate became part of the Bicol Region (Region V).
 SOUTH EAST ASIA RESEARCH 225

being Bisayan’). It is demonstrated by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who var-

iously projects himself (depending on the occasion) as Bisayan or Mindanaoan and con-
sciously cultivates the image of being a maverick outsider and ‘non-Manilan’.
However one may cut the issue, the ‘region’ is an important reality in Philippine pol-
itical life. It is an important locus for Philippine studies as well.

The long 1970s and the Visayas as an area of study

Among artists and scholars, it can be said that at no other time were the interrelated con-
cepts of the local, popular and regional as dominant a subject of discourse as in the period
called ‘the long 1970s’. This is a period that coincides (as historian Vicente Rafael noted)
with the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos from 1965 to 1986, which includes the period of
martial rule from 1971 to 1986 (Rafael 2013).
This was a time of heightened political and social unrest in the country, fuelled by an
economic crisis, a high level of discontent with government and the political system, and
wide disenchantment with central authority and established notions of what constitutes
the ‘nation’. In the cultural field, there was a turn towards the ‘popular’ (against elite
rule), as shown in the rise of radical-left politics, the turn towards the vernaculars and
local languages (particularly Tagalog) as opposed to a dominant English language, and
a heightened interest in the ‘local’ and ‘regional’ against what came to be called ‘imperial
Manila’.
The result of these challenges was that ‘the long 1970s’, though usually recalled as ‘the
dark years of the dictatorship’, was, in fact, also one of the most intellectually dynamic
periods in Philippine history. The cultural transformation was broad but here I shall
focus on what I shall call the ‘local studies movement’ – the turn towards the recovery,
study, and promotion of the local, regional and popular particularly in the fields of
history, language and literature.
The intellectual shift was quite dramatic, particularly in colleges and universities. One
must note that as late as the 1960s, Philippine education was, to use the catchphrase of the
day, distinctly ‘neo-colonial, elitist and Manila-centric’. These words may now seem
time-worn but they signified what was true of cultural conditions at the time. Literary
education in the universities was heavily Anglo-American in orientation and content,
instruction was almost exclusively carried out in English, libraries did not seriously
collect vernacular source materials, and interest in regional cultures was marginal.
To cite an instance relevant to this article’s origin in a conference located virtually in
London, when I was an undergraduate student in the 1960s in Cebu, half the listed lit-
erature courses in my university – believe it or not – dealt with British literature, includ-
ing the so-called period courses that ranged from the Age of Chaucer and the Age of
Milton to the Victorian, Romantic and Modern periods. I even had a three-unit
course just on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, because, at the time, the American
priest who headed our English department was a Hopkins specialist. In contrast, there
was only a solitary, three-unit course on Philippine Literature, and even this was
limited to Philippine literature in English.
By the end of the 1960s, however, the intellectual climate had radically changed.
English was de-privileged as a language. The shift was so radical that by the 1970s one
felt almost obliged, when talking in public, to apologize for speaking in English.
226 R. B. MOJARES

The surge of interest in the local was manifest in several initiatives. One was the rise of
local or regional studies centres. Between 1968 and 1975 several of these centres were
established: the Leyte-Samar Research Library in Tacloban; the Coordinated Investi-
gation of Sulu Cultures in Jolo; Xavier University Folklife Museum and Archives in
Cagayan de Oro; the Dansalan Research Center in Marawi; the West Visayan Studies
Program in Iloilo; and the Cebuano Studies Center in Cebu. Typically engaged in collec-
tions building, research, publications, lectures and workshops, these centres were notable
in that they arose independently of each other and were concentrated in the Visayas and
Mindanao.
In the field of history, there was the annual ‘National Conference on Local History’,
which was launched in 1978 in Cagayan de Oro and was informally organized in its
first seven years by an ad-hoc group of Visayas and Mindanao-based scholars (the con-
ference has run annually up to the present). And then there was the revival of folklore
studies when the Philippine Folklore Society once again became active between 1968
and 1988.
It is important to note that while I have focused on developments in literature and
history, a fresh, creative energy animated practically the entire field of arts and
culture, in what was a cultural groundswell rather than a single, state-sponsored, or cen-
trally directed movement. One must recall that ‘the long 1970s’ also witnessed the emer-
gence and rise of the Original Pilipino Music (OPM) movement, the flourishing of
‘people’s theatre’, a burst of original creativity in Tagalog cinema, the appearance of inde-
pendent, experimental film-making in the country, and perhaps even the rediscovery and
reinvention of Filipino cuisine. It was an exciting time for culture and the arts, one made
keener by the fact that all this was taking place in the shadow of martial rule.

The current state of the field

And so, what was achieved and where are we now? A lot of ground has been gained in the
local studies movement, and I shall point to two distinct advances.
First, there was heightened recognition of the necessary and vital role of the local, folk
and popular as constituents of the national culture. This recognition was build up
through the long 1970s and came to define the political mood in the years that followed
the fall of the dictatorship in 1986. Post-authoritarian anti-centralism was such that after
the Corazon Aquino government was installed in 1986, some people advocated the cre-
ation of a ministry of culture, but the idea was quickly shot down. What was created
instead was the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, with its decentralized,
participative structure of national committees with sectoral and regional representatives.
Similar reorientations took place in institutions like the Cultural Center of the Philip-
pines, the Institute of National Language, and the curricular and other programmes
led by the Department of Education. Decentralization, participation and inclusion had
become the watchwords of the day.
Second, there was a significant increase in collections of local and popular texts and
other materials in institutions and universities, such that students today have access to
materials that were not available to students prior to the 1970s. This enabled the
build-up of scholarship on regional history, culture and the arts. Together with the pro-
motional work of the centres of local studies, I mentioned (such as exhibits, lectures and
 SOUTH EAST ASIA RESEARCH 227

workshops), creative work in the regions was re-energized. Languages and literatures that
seemed threatened with extinction (like Kapampangan and Kiniray-a) were rejuvenated.
Such ‘reawakening’ took place in other culture areas as well.
While there is much to celebrate, there is also much in the promise of the long 1970s
that remains half-fulfilled or unfulfilled today. My sense is that, with the waning of
popular enthusiasms that followed the so-called ‘return to democracy’ in 1986, there
was also in time a diminishing of energy, focus and direction in the local studies move-
ment. Collection and conservation efforts have slowed down; a large mass of local and
vernacular texts is now available but remains mostly unstudied, and there appears to
be a lack of clarity and consensus on the most productive approaches to the study of
regional culture and history.
In part, this has to do with the tendency for claims of representation and inclusion to
be routinized and reduced to a form of tokenism and ‘affirmative action’ – a case in which
it is conceded that the region should have a place at the table but without real conviction
that it has indeed brought to the table something that is indispensably and critically
transformative of our understandings of the ‘national’ culture.
But many questions remain. How, for example, have local studies effectively interro-
gated, decentred, or revised old, dominant conceptions of Philippine culture and society?
To what extent have local studies simply provided new data for old arguments, new
details to a picture that remains basically the same, and more footnotes and subplots
for old national narratives that have remained dominant?
I am not saying that the production of new data, by itself, is unimportant, nor do I
deny the clear value of local studies for the community-building needs of local constitu-
encies. This, however, leaves mostly unanswered the question of how local studies have
measured up to the high promise that such studies would lead to significant revisions in
how the nation itself is imagined.
There is a need to refresh and re-energize the field. To start with one practical rec-
ommendation, it is urgent to look into the status of the local studies centres that
played a pioneering role in promoting local studies. It is unfortunate that, for various
reasons, most of the six centres I mentioned earlier have either ceased to exist or have
become dormant as collecting, research and publishing centres.5 While there are
encouraging moves in establishing new local studies centres in Samar, Bohol and
Iloilo, an urgent need at present is to support the revival, conservation and networking
of these centres.
To re-energize the field there is a need for fresh initiatives and approaches. I have on
previous occasions called for more cross-regional, comparative and integrative studies.
Much of the research in local studies is resolutely local. Literary criticism is still biased
in favour of single authors, a single language and a small set of texts, and attempts at
cross-regional studies are rare. While the locality is where the strength of local studies
lies, we need studies that cut across two or more localities or regions, or that attempt
a critical synthesis of a larger field.

5
Of the three in the Visayas, the Leyte-Samar Research Library ceased to operate after the university in which it was based
closed down. The library collection survived the Haiyan/Yolanda devastation in Tacloban in 2013 but remains ware-
housed and closed to the public. The West Visayan Studies Program collection exists as part of the UP Visayas
library system but does not appear to be engaged in other activities.
228 R. B. MOJARES

As early as 1982, in that landmark book on Philippine regional history, Philippine

Social History, co-edited by Alfred McCoy and de Jesus (1982), the editors already
looked at the future prospects for regional histories, seeing how local studies have
tended to be mitotic, a case of ‘more of the same’, where research simply moves to
one more town, one more province, instead of striking out to new ways of configuring
the area to be studied. McCoy and de Jesus proposed three directions that need to be
taken: more inter-regional or even intra-regional studies; studies that look beyond the
local/national axis and look instead at the linkages between localities, like, say, Iloilo
and Cebu, or external markets and other centres of political and commercial power;
and (more ambitiously) international comparisons between, say, a region in the
Philippines and a region elsewhere in South East Asia or Latin America (de Jesus
1982; McCoy 1982a). Long-distance, multi-site studies will probably be beyond the
resource capacities of local scholars but there are many possibilities for claiming wider
ground for study, if not geographically then empirically or theoretically.
There are opportunities to widen the field even if one stays in one’s locality. In the
study of popular fiction, for instance, one can draw from the example of the critic
Franco Moretti, who criticizes the bias for the ‘close reading’ of canonical texts that rep-
resent only a very tiny percentage of literary works that have been published, leaving
practically unexamined the remaining 99% of popular literature, what Moretti (2013)
calls ‘the Great Unread’. He proposes instead a focus, for instance, on genres and sub-
genres of popular fiction. In what he calls ‘distant reading’, one starts with a working
set of units of meaning (motifs, plot strategies, stylistic elements) that define a particular
genre (romantic novels or crime stories, for example) and then read a large number of
texts covering a wide geographical area and span of time to identify the morphological
changes of a genre and see how these changes are to be explained by reference to the
larger sociocultural system.
The aim, Moretti declares, is ‘to make the literary field longer, larger, and deeper: his-
torically longer, geographically larger, and morphologically deeper’ (2008, 111; see also
Mojares 2002). This is a productive approach since popular fiction lends itself to
‘distant’ (as opposed to ‘close’) reading, and it addresses the fact that while a large
mass of popular texts was collected in the heyday of local studies in the 1970s, much
of it has remained unexamined and unstudied. We also need to do more comparative,
cross-regional work. The value here is illustrated in two important books on the Philip-
pines revolution, Jim Richardson’s The Light of Liberty (2013) and Michael Cullinane’s
Arenas of Conspiracy (2014).6 By a happy convergence, these independently conceived
books use the same quantitative approach in addressing the same problem (the class
composition of the initiators of the revolution), except that Richardson deals with
Manila, and Cullinane focuses on Cebu. Based on archival documents, Richardson ident-
ifies 145 members of the revolutionary Katipunan and their occupations at the outbreak
of hostilities in 1896. He finds that of the 145 leaders and members, fifty-nine were past or
present government officers and employees, mostly town or village heads and govern-
ment clerks, and at least forty-five were mostly skilled urban artisans, self-employed or
working in commercial-industrial establishments. For his part, Cullinane identifies 340
participants in the first months of the uprising in Cebu in 1898. (Cullinane includes

6
Also see Mojares 2017.
 SOUTH EAST ASIA RESEARCH 229

data on occupation, education, residence, and linkages as kinsmen, co-workers, neigh-

bours, or friends.) His figures are even more striking: 88% of the leaders and participants
in Cebu were salaried employees and/or municipal office-holders and principales, and
70% had some secondary or tertiary education.
Both studies support the view that this was not exactly a ‘revolt of the masses’ but one
that involved (in Richardson’s terms) ‘lower-middle’ or ‘middle-middle’ elements, urban
and mostly literate, well plugged into the circuits of the state and modern sectors of the
economy. There are differences, however, owing to the locations studied. One difference
between Richardson’s and Cullinane’s studies is the relative absence of ‘proletarian’
elements in Cebu, which is to be explained by the difference in geographical location
(occupation groups like factory workers and skilled artisans were not sizeable in
numbers in Cebu), a factor often glossed over as the specificities of location and complex-
ities of class are sacrificed in the rush towards ‘national generalizations’. Taken together,
the two studies fill a gap in our understanding of the geography of the revolution.
We can get a better sense of the region if we view a much wider field than a town, dis-
trict, or province, but we can also try to draw from the region its distinct character. If
there is anything that so visibly distinguishes the Visayas from Luzon or Mindanao, it
is its maritime, Mediterranean character. To think of the Visayas as a ‘mini-Mediterra-
nean’ is to suggest movement, contact and exchange, porousness of borders, what is
outward rather than inward-looking, what is fluid and hybrid rather than what is
settled and sedentary. These are defining elements of the life of the region. Travelling
between, say, Talibon in Bohol and the port of Cebu, one is struck by how busy the
sea traffic is – pump boats, fishing vessels and passenger ferries busily course to and
fro between these two points. The sea, indeed, is a veritable highway: it not only
divides, it connects. And yet, why don’t we have histories that treat Cebu and Bohol
(or other islands for that matter) together instead of separately? Hemp production in
nineteenth-century Leyte contributed greatly to the expansion of the port of Cebu (it
is remarkable that many of the big Cebu business families today – such as Escano,
Aboitiz, and Gothong – actually had their start in Leyte). Yet, we do not have a
history of this interaction. The geographer Frederick Wernstedt (1957) mapped shipping
routes connecting the port of Cebu to points in the Visayas and Mindanao, affording us a
view of the dynamic flow of people and goods over a wide area. Yet, a good history still
remains to be written about Philippine interisland shipping, despite the fact that Cebu is
the capital of Philippine interisland shipping.
This extends to other transportation systems, agricultural and industrial zones, and
trading networks that have played such a vital role in shaping our sense of the region.
Of the international trading linkages that McCoy and de Jesus recommended for
study, we have in the Visayas the classic example of the story of the nineteenth-
century Englishman Nicholas Loney, vice-consul in Iloilo and agent of British textile
firms, who – in promoting the large-scale importation of cheap Manchester cotton
from Liverpool and promoting the opening up of Negros to sugar plantations to
produce the sugar that can be carried for the return voyage of the ships that bring in
the textiles – killed what had been a vibrant native weaving industry and turned
Negros into a monocrop plantation economy (see McCoy 1982b; Pomeranz and Topik
2006, 237–239).
230 R. B. MOJARES

In 2021, we marked the Quincentennial of the First Circumnavigation of the Globe by

the Ferdinand Magellan expedition of 1519–1522. In the Philippines, the Visayas was the
centre of the commemorations since the events celebrated took place in the Visayas: the
first mass (Limasawa, Southern Leyte), the first baptisms (Cebu), and the Battle of
Mactan in which Magellan perished at the hands of the inhabitants of Mactan Island
in Cebu.
It has been argued that Magellan had already coasted in Philippine waters around 1512
when he was in Malacca fighting in the service of the Portuguese king. Hence, Magellan
had in fact already circumnavigated the globe when he reached the Visayas in 1521. Since
the circumnavigation of the globe may rightly be considered the founding event in the
history of globalization, then the Visayas (as has been argued) can be taken as the ur-
site in the history of globalization (see Lifshey 2012, 152–153).
This is not bad as far as symbolisms go, since what happened in the Visayas was both a
conversion and a battle, which can be said of the reality of globalization as well. This
points to a much larger story than I have here sketched. But it is a good place to start.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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