Unlocking our glorious past. Instilling individual sense of pride. Creating a brighter future.
The
Filipino
Project
About Us
The Filipino Project aims to spread and educate Filipinos and the world about the Philippines' rich cultural heritage before colonizers arrived in the archipelago. Our precolonial history points to our ancestors as being creative, innovative, and at one with nature. These are borne out of archaeological artifacts, land structures such as the Banaue Rice Terraces, linguistic studies, and, [limited] genetic testing of Filipinos, the analysis of which have been published in scientific and peer-reviewed journals and books but have not penetrated popular media, and even textbooks used in Philippine schools to teach our history.
The relatively recent colonization of the Philippines for the past half millennium that brought Islam, Christianity and American-style education to the country, has created a people that fell victim to cultural genocide resulting to a collective amnesia about who and what we were before colonizers arrived. Yet, despite this, Filipinos, being adaptable and resilient, have intuitively made these religions uniquely their own, subconsciously incorporating their precolonial culture. It is time to shine a light to a glorious past that, to all intents and purposes equal those of other great civilizations, will make each and every Filipino (including those who are multi-cultural and live in other countries) proud of their heritage.
Spreading New Insights from Discovered Artifacts
The recent discovery of the ~65,000-year-old bones of Callao Man and supported by the previously discovered 45,000-year-old bones of the Tabon Cave Man does not support the long-held Beyer Theory of Migration on how the Philippines was peopled. The Beyer Thoery, which is still being taught to Filipino students to this day in history books proposed that our ancestors were Negritos, Indonesians, and, Malaysians who came in waves via land bridges.
Coupled with the above discoveries, there is a growing agreement among scholars of history, archaeology, anthropology and genetics that this is not the case. F. Landa Jocano, the Philipine's foremost cultural anthropologist asserts, in his Core Population Theory, that "there weren't clear discrete waves of migration, but a long process of cultural evolution and movement of people" who occupied the archipelago.
The past half century or so has shed light on many other discovered artifacts such as the Laguna Copper Plate, the Surigao Gold, the UNESCO world heritage site of the Butuan motherboats, just to mention a few. Most of these insights are published in scientific papers and need to be spread to Filipinos to instill a sense of pride in our culture.
The Need for More Genetic Testing of Filipinos
F. Landa Jocano further suggests that "early inhabitants of Southeast Asia were once of the same ethnic group with similar culture, but eventually - through a gradual process driven by environmental factors - differentiated themselves from one another." Linguistic studies and limited genetic testing has strongly pointed to Filipinos being mostly of the Austronesian/Micronesian , rather than of Indo-Malayan in origin as suggested by Beyer, such origins being similar to Pacific Islanders as well the Australian aborigines. More genetic testing needs to to be done to establish this more firmly.
The importance of establishing Filipinos as Pacific Islanders have implications especially in the United States of America, where the US Census has classified Filipino-Americans as Asians, and not Pacific Islanders.
What We Do
We begin the task of shining a light on our precolonial history by showcasing our diverse culture through dance and providing a precolonial context, both historical and cultural, for each dance performance.
In the USA, we have begun to conduct lectures/workshops such as "Defining Filipino" meant to understand and educate what it means to be Filipino in America and/or what it means to be Filipino-American, and how this impacts opportunities available to us and to our community. Here is an abstract of one of these lectures.
Identity, whether personal or group, has been a topic for discussion in many disciplines, and its definition can range from group consciousness, culture, activism to form of politics. So when one asks a Filipino, whether born and raised in the Philippines , or newly minted Filipino immigrants to the United States and other foreign lands, or those who were born in the United States, but raised under the umbrella of Filipino tradition, the definition of Filipino identity is as diverse as identity itself, and a wellspring of conversation.
The Philippines was a colony of Spain, much like Mexico, yet the question remains whether Filipinos should be, or could be classified as Hispanic. Further complicating that layer of identity, are Filipinos Asian or Pacific Islander? Who defines what Filipino means? And what does this mean to our community? To your family? To opportunities available to us?