Rhetorical Indios: Propagandists and Their Publics in the Spanish Philippines

Censorship notwithstanding, the final half-century of Spanish rule in the Philippines was a time of efflorescence in colonial print culture. Between the advent of typo-lithography in 1858 and the successive occurrence, in 1896 and 1898, of the Filipino revolution and the Spanish-American War, printing presses operating in Manila and beyond issued thousands of books and periodicals, the first public library, the Muséo-Bibliotéca de Filipinas, opened its doors in 1887, and the importation of books from Europe and America could scarcely keep pace with demand.Anthropolog

Culture

Page range: 51-56This essay is one of more than a dozen in this volume to honor the late Mary Margaret Steedly. The paper’s theme is “culture.” Steedly regarded stories as belonging to two distinct but entwined orders of reality: experience and memory. Since primary experience is always at the point of vanishing, it is only and inevitably through personal (and, in different ways, collective) memory that it can become publicly expressed and accessed anew. The two orders of reality coming together in narrative, for the act of recollection before an audience, whether real or fantasized, constitutes its own form of experience. This, in a roundabout way, brought Steedly back to “culture.” Stories became a privileged point of entry into culture as a manifold of potential significations that no individual storyteller ever grasps in its entirety, even though he or she is continuously in the midst of actualizing it. Not surprisingly, then, Steedly’s signature way of writing ethnography (one could say, of writing culture) was to retell someone else’s story for purposes of her own. And while her topics and concerns ranged widely, they inevitably included the textuality of the story itself: how it had been told, what had occasioned its telling, and how it had fared with its audience. Steedly veered subtly off the anthropologist’s traditional path of cultural translation toward what might be more aptly called “cultural transcreation.” Situating each story afresh, putting it in conversation with other sources of information—songs, genealogies, official records, authoritative accounts—she sought to open up an entire horizon of refracted significances before new audiences.2025-04-0

Introduction—Someone Else Speaking: Reflections on Mary Steedly as Author and Anthropologist

Page range: 1-16This essay introduces the fifteen pieces in this volume that honor the late Mary Margaret Steedly—a collection that emphasizes her ground-breaking contributions to anthropology, feminist studies, and the study of Indonesia. Many of the pieces included here originated as oral presentations by Steedly’s colleagues and students at two memorial events. Not surprisingly, then, these brief expository essays include reminiscences by people who were close to her. As the contributors make clear, Steedly’s deep and generative commitment to interlocutors, students, and colleagues demands to be acknowledged in its own right. Taken as a whole, this multivocal tribute reflects and reaffirms a central conviction of Steedly’s entire body of work, namely, that “voices are never singular, meaning is always negotiated, and there is room in any story for someone else’s speaking.”2025-04-0