Suchergebnisse

On one level, this article examines a delimited demographic crisis in the provincial Philippines : an apparently precipitous decline in the population of Batangas between 1887 and 1903. On another, it sub- jects to scrutiny two of the major sources of Philippine historical demography — parish records and the census of 1903.
This study finds that both the parish records and the census are seriously flawed. The chief deficiency of the former is under-registration of events, especially in the burial registers, which in one year alone failed to include at least 31 percent of the deceased. The latter, which has often been used by demographers as a baseline in population projections, undercounts the population of Batangas by no fewer than 10,000 people, approximately 4 percent of the total count.
Given tbe flaws of the sources, the author is unable to account for the observed population décline in Batangas with any précision, but it is able, all the same, to make an informed guess about the principal demographic trends of the period. Between 1887 and 1898, natural increase in the province appeared to be minimal, because of an abnormally high level of mortality due to epidemic disease. Conditions then seemed to improve slightly between 1899 and 1901, and the level of mortality decreased. Finally, in 1902, there were two successive epidemies — malaria and cholera — which together were responsible for most of the population decline ; all in all, during that single year alone, the natural decrease was close to 34,000.

For more than two decades, the standard account of the Filipino side of the Philippine-American War has been Teodoro Agoncillo's Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic. Agoncillo's book is, by the author's own admission, a celebration of the role of the Filipino "masses" in the second phase of the Philippine Revolution. "If I appear inclined to sympathize with the masses", he writes, "it is because their faith in the cause of the Republic was unshaken and their patriotism and self-sacrifice unsullied by selfish motives." The villains of his story are the "Haves" (Agoncillo also refers to them as the "plutocrats" and the "middle class") who, in his view, betrayed their countrymen by collaborating with the Americans and undermining the war effort. He directs his harshest criticism at Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, Benito Legarda, Cayetano Arellano, and other Manila-based men of means. Agoncillo repeats this story, albeit in briefer form, in a popular college-level text, which he coauthored with Milagros Guerrero.

Although the United States granted the Philippines formal independence in 1946, American influence in the former colony did not disappear overnight. In the decades following independence, American policymakers continued to play key roles in Philippine politics; American businessmen, presidents, legislators, and bureaucrats and US-based international money lending agencies continued to have a considerable impact on the Philippine economy; and American popular culture continued to penetrate Philippine society and culture (as it did elsewhere). But perhaps no sector of Philippine society was as profoundly influenced by Americans as the academic one, and no subdivision of the Philippine academy bore the American imprint as visibly as Philippine social science. This paper examines the academic career, writings, institution-building efforts, and scholarly agenda of the US-born scholar who arguably had the greatest impact on post-war Philip- pine social science: Father Frank Lynch, a Jesuit professor of anthropology and sociology at Ateneo de Manila University.