“Same Banana”: Hazing and Honor at the Philippine Military Academy

Abstract

On june 15, 1936, 120 fresh cadets assembled at Manila's Tutuban Station to board a train for the Philippine Military Academy (PMA), recently established in the mountain city of Baguio. At the end of the line, the cadets changed to Benguet Auto Line buses for the 4,000-foot climb up the zig-zag road to Baguio. As the buses pulled into the campus, some forty upperclassmen, all transfers from the superseded Constabulary Academy, were waiting to greet the new arrivals with a ritual called “hazing.” Even fifty years later, these cadets would recall their reception as traumatic (J. Mendoza 1986, 16).

Commanding men, governing masculinities: Military institutional abuse and organizational reform in the Australian armed forces

“…Hazing is a persistent and enduring cultural practice across many military organizations. Studies have documented hazing in the armed forces of Canada (Razack, 2000, 2004; Whitworth, 2005; Winslow, 1999), South Korea (Kwon et al., 2007), Russia (Elkner, 2004), the Philippines (McCoy, 1995), Brazil (de Albuquerque & Paes‐Machado, 2004), and Norway (Østvik & Rudmin, 2001).…”

Violence and Hypermasculinity in University Fraternity Initiations: Situating the Reproduction of Masculinity in the Philippines

“…To lead the nation, being a scholar is not enough; one must also be a warrior, a “war tactician.” Exclusion from state military leadership in the American colonial period left an emasculating effect that drove Filipino men toward a cult of masculinity , one that is oriented to a Euro American militarized masculinity (McCoy, 2002). Hazing served as transformative trauma to achieving militarized manhood for college males enlisted in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, notably in UPD, and for those enrolled at the elite Philippine Military Academy (McCoy, 1995, 2002). U.S. armed forces quelled the resistance of Filipinos to its occupation of the Philippines in 1898 that invalidated the earlier victories of the Katipunan-led revolution of Filipinos against Spain in 1896.…”

Civil–Military Relations in Indonesia and the Philippines

“…As Alfred McCoy makes clear, the first full class to be inducted into the Philippine Military Academy in 1940 actually invented the traditions of military professionalism that initially distinguished the Philippine military. 44 The new officer corps was modeled on West Point, and this helps to explain the subsequent determination to remain an apolitical force-a goal that endured for some twenty years or so. Significantly, however, the attempt to retain a sense of military professionalism and political neutrality became a potentially fatal obstacle to the professional progress of the Class of 1940 and its immediate successors, as the new currency of social and economic advancement in the Philippines became political patronage.…”