The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore

Ramos, Maximo D.

doi:10.2307/1499218

Cited by 3 publications

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“…On June 11, 2021, Netflix released the Philippine-made anime Trese to an international audience. 1 Based on the eponymous three-volume comics series (De Vera, 2018), Trese draws on Filipino folklore including the myth of aswang, originally associated with the feminine character of a vampire-like monster (Nadeau, 2011;Menez, 1996;Ramos, 1969). As a dark mythical imaginary, the aswang became popular during Spain's colonisation of the islands.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Spanish friars retaliated by outlawing shamanism, forcefully removing babaylans from communities and demonising their adherents and followers through association with sorcery and witchcraft, alongside the systematic Christianisation of the natives. The latter only resulted in ambiguous syncrasy -the difficult harmonising of disparate biblical and folkloric elements centred on the feminine (Ramos, 1969). It is safe to say that some babaylan groups took advantage of these amorphous and mixed layers of characterisation while operating underground to escape persecution, remaining outside of the ambit of colonial violence and oppressive patriarchal culture.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Monster-producing Islands: Prospects for island detourning in contemporary times

Rivas¹

2022

Shima

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Colonialism produces monsters thriving in island ecologies, but without a structural/historical treatment of how island monsters are created, how the agential relation between colonisers and natives accentuates the dynamics of interpellation, the island would reveal nothing of its past, the reusable trace that can be interpellated in the present. In the modern-day Philippines, a former colonial object to three foreign aggressions (Spanish, American and Japanese) that spanned almost half a millennium, such reusable trace has recently entered the international streaming platform Netflix. Trese (2021), a Philippine-made anime, navigates the myth of aswang, one of the dominant features of Filipino folklore, which centres on the image of a female, vampire-like monster. This image traces its iterative root in the lost history of the babaylans (female shamans) amid the creation of folk Christianity and diffracted engagements with the Christian indoctrination of the islands. This article navigates this subject and how Trese, among other actants in this play of figuration, is itself interpellated by traces of historical, geographical, and non-human ecologies that, in turn, reflect the fundamental role of liquidity in monster-creation as a material-semiotic intervention. As the discussions expand on the two most essential concepts in Island Studies today, the archipelagic and the aquapelagic, the article deploys the concept of detourning, a critical rhetorical arc that binds the article’s multi-faceted discussions, connections, and combinations, from human to the non-human, thus completing its assessment of the dynamics of islands being interpellated by traces.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monster-producing Islands: Prospects for island detourning in contemporary times

Rivas¹

2022

Shima

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Enchanted Worlds: Visayan Children's Perspectives on Living amongEngkanto

Mitchell¹,

Mitchell

2011

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

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The Tarob and the Sacred Oath. Liminal Spirits and Stories Creating Heterotopic Spaces in Dusun Culture

Potter

2017

eTropic

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This article explores two stories told during the production of the transmedia documentary project Big Stories, Small Towns: Bongkud-Namaus in the Dusun villages of Bongkud and Namaus in Sabah, Malaysia. Both stories relate to hungry and sacred entities -an atomised, monstrous moon-eating spirit called the Tarob, and a sacred oath bound in blood, which eats anyone who breaks it. The article will introduce the Big Stories, Small Towns project, the process that underpins this project and the site of production in Sabah of one iteration of the Big Stories, Small Towns, before analysing heterotopic conceptions associated with aspects of folklore in the Southeast Asian region. Providing a theoretical framework that reflects upon a key text by Evans (1953) -an early translator of Dusun folklore for Western audiences -aspects of Dusun culture will be explored that illuminate details of the two case study stories. An historical and theoretical treatment of the stories will frame a fusion of transmedia and folklore in manifesting liminal beings to emergence. This fusion of transmedia and folklore facilitates representation and remediation of cultural identities, thus enabling a wider society -in this case Malaysian society -to develop a more nuanced cultural awareness of itself.

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The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Monster-producing Islands: Prospects for island detourning in contemporary times

Monster-producing Islands: Prospects for island detourning in contemporary times

Enchanted Worlds: Visayan Children's Perspectives on Living amongEngkanto

The Tarob and the Sacred Oath. Liminal Spirits and Stories Creating Heterotopic Spaces in Dusun Culture

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