“Pantayong Pananaw” as a descriptive concept can pertain to any social collectivity

which possesses a relatively unified and internally articulated linguistic-cultural structure

of communication and interaction and/or a sense of oneness of purpose and existence.
In broad strokes, pantayong pananaw’s approach begins with the need to sustain
a talastasang bayan (national discourse) by distinguishing among different
historiographies and how they relate to the formation of national/cultural identity. The
first, the pangkayo perspective (‘from-you-for-us’ perspective), refers to the judgments
made by external agents upon one’s culture; the pangkayo perspective mainly refers to
colonial historiography that judged Filipinos’ beliefs and customs using purely external
cultural standards. Opposite to this is the pangkami perspective (‘from-us-to-you’
perspective), which was initially espoused by a generation of intellectuals who were
educated in Spain and then responded to the accusations of colonial historiography
regarding aspects of Filipino cultural heritage.

They were succeeded by Filipino scholars who wrote about Philippine culture and
society using English or Spanish, the ‘languages of the colonizers’, as a medium of
discourse. The pantayong pananaw, therefore, seeks to create a ‘closed circuit of
interaction’ (Mendoza 2007) between academic discourse (especially history)
and kaalamang katutubo (indigenous knowledge). In this regard, language plays a
central role; hence, historians identified with pantayong pananaw speak and write in
Philippine languages so that the talastasan (discourse) is always oriented toward local
cultures and not to ‘outsiders’ and their interests.