On Hindsight: Intersections of Heritage and COVID-19 in the Philippines Pandemic Experience

Abstract

The centenary cycle of pandemics has produced structural and systemic changes in society. The pandemics of cholera (1820s) and Spanish flu (1920s) forcibly adjusted policies and practices in medicine, health, nutrition, aesthetics, architecture and town planning. When the COVID-19 (2020) pandemic impacted the Philippines with lockdowns and quarantines, Filipinos were socially straightjacketed, but they creatively evolved the ways of survival. This study introduced a mapping matrix that wove heritage attributes into the cycle of a pandemic. Documenting COVID-19 coping narratives in social media, the objective was to plot the intersections of heritage taxonomy (natural, built, intangible and movable) against Shah’s (2016, Pandemic: Tracking contangions from cholera to Ebola and beyond) cycle of pandemic (origin, transmission, condition, community, management, scapegoat, cure and recurrence). With the stringent physical limitations imposed by the government, data were generated for 2020–2021 through social media accounts, personal observations and mobile phone conversations. This contextualization captured compelling heritage case studies on survival and resilience mechanisms that emerged across the country. On hindsight, the pandemic was a dramatic rupture in the Philippine society that innovated heritage-based programmes of sustainability and revived Filipino values of nobleness and humanity.