Dr. Paul Dumol

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol I wish to present some general considerations about education in citizenship before going on to general considerations about home-school-community convergence. I hope you all agree that citizenship is learned, first of all, at home; secondly, in one’s community; and lastly, in school. This sequence is not chronological; it refers, rather, to the varying impact these three teachers of citizenship have. The home is the most powerful; the community

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol “El verdadero decálogo” is a list of ten precepts written by Apolinario Mabini in the manner of the Ten Commandments. The adjective verdadero or true (in the sense of tunay) implicitly compares Mabini’s Ten Commandments with the Ten Commandments of Christianity. The implications could be disturbing to Christians, but Mabini intends considerably less than his words apparently imply. I will return to this question at a later stage of this talk. “El

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol INTRODUCTION: OUR IMPASSE Let me begin with a quotation from the column of Mr Teodoro Benigno in the Philippine Star: We Filipinos are into a fit of self-pity these days. We wonder why we are so corrupt, why our country is such a receptacle for spiraling crime and violence, why our poverty is one of the worst in Asia, why our countrymen are leaving by the droves…. And yet as we wonder, there is an even more striking phenomenon. We don’t sink int

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol I am currently engaged in a project to gather Benedict XVI’s ideas on art and beauty, analyze them, and put them together in an aesthetic theory. In the process I have come upon a particular claim of Benedict’s that is not easy to explain, although it is one I understand. I sense the explanation is to be found in Leonardo Polo’s work on thinking. My preliminary research into Polo is what I wish to report on in this talk. In his message to the Co

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol The Purgatorio Last week I identified seven scenes in the Inferno that seven centuries of Dante readers have singled out for their intense emotional charge, so much so that many have wondered whether they contained a personal meaning for Dante of an autobiographical nature. I have suggested that they represent sins that Dante was either guilty of or attracted to. Three cantos, in particular, seem to present us with sins Dante was guilty of. That i

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol The Paradiso In last week’s lecture we confronted Beatrice’s accusations against Dante. She accuses him of two sins, summed up in her phrase “o pargoletta/ o altra novità”—a “green young girl or other novelty” in Mandelbaum’s translation, which we have reduced to (I shudder to say the word, but that’s what he would be accused of today) pedophilia and heresy. What I have called “heresy” Beatrice calls “blasphemy,” and by blasphemy she means coming

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol The Inferno It is bad form to begin a lecture with an apology, but that is exactly what I will do. This series of lectures on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is not addressed to scholars, but to people who know barely anything about Dante’s work. This is the parameter I have been given. On the other hand, I do not want to repeat what you may easily find on Google, whether about Dante or his Comedy. So I have decided to talk about the Divine Come

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol An Overview The acknowledged legacy of the missionaries is, of course, Christianity, which is usually understood to have been achieved in record numbers by the first quarter of the seventeenth century.1 The unacknowledged legacy is the townships or pueblos the missionaries founded all over Luzon, the Visayan islands, and northern Mindanao.2 Some 820 of them survive to the present day, which is not a small number, and they are often the centers of

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol This is a report on an ongoing project. Our project, entitled “The Pueblos of Panay,” is in fact part of a larger project involving all the pueblos founded in Spanish times in the Philippines. Let me describe this larger project which serves as the context of our present project. The project team, comprising Dr Grace Concepcion, Mr EJ Ofilada, and me, wish to explore another way of narrating the rise of the Philippine nation. When the Spaniards ar

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol I wish to thank the Samahang Pangkasaysayan ng Bulacan for this signal honor of giving the keynote address in your annual conference. I consider it a signal honor because you are engaged in local history and it has been my conviction for some years now that, at the present time, local historians are the real historians of the Philippines. I have entitled my speech “The Importance of the History of Pueblos in the Philippines.” Let me plunge immedi

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol Published in Cuadernos del Instituto Cervantes Numero 2 Between 1916 and 1918, D. Gonzalo Maria Piñana gathered notarized statements regarding José Rizal's retraction from surviving eyewitnesses of the event. The longest and most detailed of these is that of Fr. Vicente Balaguer, S.J., the priest with whom Rizal discussed his ideas on religion for several hours on the 29th of December, 1896. This account is obviously the most important document on

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol At the end of Rizal’s Filibusterismo, after Simoun’s death and while P. Florentino’s servants attend to the corpse, P. Florentino murmurs: Where are the youth who should consecrate their rosy hours, their dreams and enthusiasm to the good of their homeland? Where are they who should pour out their blood generously to wash away so much shame, so many crimes, so much abomination? The victim has to be pure and unstained for the holocaust to be accep

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol Published in Budhi, 2004. The invitation I received to be one of the speakers at your Midyear Conference suggested the theme “Philosophy and Political Responsibility” with the hope that this paper I am reading to you now might be of help in preparing for the coming general elections. Resort to philosophy is characteristically a sign that things are deteriorating woefully or getting out of hand. There is in truth a general feeling of hopelessness

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol Published in European Studies: Essays by Filipino Scholars.1999. Vya Victoria M, Aguire, editor. UP Press. In 1897, the Austrian ethnographer Ferdinand Blumentritt published an obituary of his intimate friend, José Rizal, in the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie (10: 88–92 [1897]).1 Wenceslao Retana calls the article, from which he quotes extensively in his biography of Rizal, “curioso,”2and such it may well strike the reader as it gives us

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol Last April and May a team of UA&P teachers, of which I had the good fortune to form part, held training seminars for public school teachers. The topic of the seminars was the integration of civic education into the high school Social Studies curriculum. We—Mr. Mirshariff Tillah and Mr. John Avila of the Institute of Political Economy, Mr. Clement Camposano and I from the Department of History, and Dr. Severina Villegas and Miss Gladys Golo of the

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol Panganiban’s Diksyunaryo-Tesauro Pilipino-Ingles lists four meanings for the word bayan: (1) town, municipality; (2) country, nation; (3) public, people, citizens; and (4) Memecylon ovatum: a medicinal shrub. I will leave the medicinal shrub to others more competent; it is the first three meanings I wish to discuss in this paper. We are familiar with these meanings. What is curious is that, if you submit them to historical analysis, they seem to b

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol One of the few works attributed to Andres Bonifacio is the article “Ang dapat mabatid ng mga tagalog” that appeared in Kalayaan, the newspaper of the Katipunan. Although no copy of the newspaper survives, there is a Spanish translation of it made by Juan Caro y Moya for Wenceslao Retana which appeared in Retana’s Archivo del bibliófilo Filipino. Nevertheless, a copy of Bonifacio’s essay does survive. Anyone who compares its first line with Caro’s a

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol The Department of Education of the Philippine government prescribes a syllabus for a course on Philippine history in Philippine high schools that is probably the closest we get to an official history of the Philippines. The narrative of this official history presents a thrice-repeated pattern of freedom lost and freedom regained. The first time the pattern appears is with Spanish colonization followed by the proclamation of Philippine independence

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol In the old high school curriculum before the K-12 curriculum, Social Studies for First Year High School was Philippine History and Government. One of the course topics was the difference between nation and state. A co-teacher used to illustrate this difference by citing the case of Yugoslavia as a state composed of nations, commenting dramatically how it was possible to love your nation but hate your state. Yugoslavia, of course, no longer exists

By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol The title of this article refers to three texts: Bonifacio's manifesto published in March 1896 in Kalayaan, the Katipunan's newspaper; the Proclamation of Independence of June 12, 1898, which I have linked to Aguinaldo in the title of this article only because it is popularly associated with him (we know that its author is the lawyer, Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista); and Mabini's Ordenanzas de la revolución published in April 1898. The title alludes to t