To think I could be translating Katy Perry songs right now… oh well.
The mob lynching Tracy Borres – yes, even myself – is not beyond reproach. If you’re going to preach respeto and pag-unawa, you’ll not do the following:
- Indiscreetly call Tracy a “bitch” on the basis of an indiscretion.
- Drag her parents and her family into the issue.
- Proclaim your respect and understanding of other cultures even if you’ve mocked a Sikh or an Igorot – heck, an Atenean – at one point in your life, and did so without remorse or apology.
Anyway, a friend of mine points out a rather important thing I missed out on the previous post about Ms. Borres’ post: the “immersion” itself. Was Tracy “immersed” enough in her weekend experience with the Aetas to have a reasonably scholarly opinion on the matter expected of any student?
Maybe those anthropology classes will probably make sense now, even if I’m not a practicing social anthropologist.
I would like to take exception to the claim that Tracy was being “racist.” To speak of race is itself racist and unscientific:
- Race is a dated concept that banks on the colonialist, Age of Exploration idea that “whites are better than colored people,” or that one race is genetically predisposed to being inferior to another.
- From a racial perspective, the primary basis of human differences is not cultural practice (like ritual and custom), but skin color. Race disregards cultural practice in favor of genetics.
- Analysis of societies in terms of race do not take into account geography, politics, and history. Theories based on race cannot explain cultural phenomena like migration or diaspora.
The Aeta peoples are not a race, but an ethnic/ethnolinguistic group. Tracy, for all intents and purposes, was being ethnocentric. I know that it may just be a problem of a choice of words… but it is exactly a choice of words that got us all talking and having a problem like this anyway.
