What is it about?
Through an extended critique of Ileto's work, this article examines the ideas of the lower classes and how they shaped the ways workers and peasants joined in the Philippine Revolution against Spain in the 1890s. Ileto tried to describe what the masses were thinking by using the religious text of the pasyon, which is the story of Christ's suffering sung every Holy Week. This article argues that the sources that Ileto used to describe the thinking of the masses failed to provide an accurate picture of that thinking because Ileto neglected to consider the impact of the ways in which they were performed as songs and plays.
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Why is it important?
Ileto's book, Pasyon and Revolution, is one of most famous works of Philippine historiography and a good deal of later research has been based on Ileto's work. This articles re-examination of Ileto's conclusions lays the basis for a significant rewriting of Philippine history.
Perspectives
As an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley in the early aughts, I was, like most scholars of Philippine history, deeply inspired by Reynaldo Ileto’s classic 1979 work. On revisiting his work as a graduate student I found, however, that while I found the questions he posed to be immensely important, I found his answers increasingly problematic. The end result of the research that I carried out in response to my sense of unease was a master's thesis on Ileto's work, which I later published in part as this article.
Dr Joseph Scalice
Hong Kong Baptist University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reynaldo Ileto's Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique, Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, March 2018, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies,
DOI: 10.1355/sj33-1b.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Ileto's Pasyon and Revolution Revisited
Personal notes on the article from the author.
Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and revolution revisited, a critique
Reynaldo Ileto’s 1979 work Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910, attempted to reconstruct the categories of perception of “the masses” by using the religious performance of the suffering and death of Christ, the pasyon, as source material. Critical re-examination of his work reveals that the attempt was deeply flawed. It engaged with the pasyon as a literary text, ignored the significance of its performance and treated it in an ahistorical manner. An attentiveness to performance demonstrates that the pasyon was a cross-class and linguistically specific phenomenon. This insight dramatically attenuates the argumentative force of Ileto’s claim to provide an historical understanding of the consciousness of the masses and their participation in revolution.
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