Specific Cultural Setting Research Articles

Rape as a Crime of War

Although widespread, rape of women has been an underreported aspect of military conflict until recently. The current war in the former Yugoslavia has focused attention on the use of rape as a deliberate strategy to undermine community bonds and weaken resistance to aggression. In addition to providing treatment for individual survivors, the medical community has an important role to play in investigating and documenting incidents of rape. Such documentation can help to establish the magnitude of rape in war and hold perpetrators accountable. Since rape in war affects not only the individual but also the family and community to which the survivor belongs, the restoration of social and community bonds is central to the process of healing and must be addressed within the specific cultural setting.

Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel until 1940 (review)

Reviewed by: Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel until 1940 Abdul Majid B. Nabi Baksh Resil B. Mojares . Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel until 1940. Quezon City: U of the Philippines P, 1983. 398 pp. pb. $13.50. Distributed in the United States by U of Hawaii P. This study of the origins and rise of the Filipino novel, for which the author was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of the Philippines in 1979, clearly demonstrates the social, economic, and political forces that first produced and then continued to shape the genre up to 1940. Yet the study is more than just a chronological history of the moulding of the genre by a specific cultural setting, for it also analyzes and evaluates the internal developments of not just the genre itself but also the indigenous traditions to which it belongs. The Filipino novel, which appeared late in the nineteenth century, developed from a dynamic pre-colonial tradition of folk narratives (epics, ballads) as these interacted with and were modified by the cultural forms (corridos) introduced by the Spanish colonizers. The study traces, within the social context, the formal mutations undergone by the narrative of the epic through the following literary forms, each of which developed from its predecessor: the corrido, the religious conduct book, the vernacular novel, and the novel in English. The approach is eminently successful in answering the one broad question to which the study addresses itself: "What forces in literary tradition (and this necessarily includes the facts of social history) determined or occasioned the shifts that led to the rise of the novel and constituted its formation up to 1940?" The exposition of the social circumstances to which the analysis of the "internal shifts" is related serves to explain the specific characteristics of the Filipino novel: its tendency to be didactic, socialistic, and nationalistic and to develop an idealized rather than an empirical portrayal of life. The study also discusses the rise and generally deleterious impact of popular literature on the art of the Filipino novel early in the twentieth century. The scope of this study, based on "170 primary texts, most of them novels," is wide. Although it concentrates on novels in four of the many languages of the Philippines—Spanish, English, Tagalog, Cebuano—the few works in Iloko and Hiligayon that are considered help to invest it with a wider national outlook. Further, the discussion of the form and geneology of the novel draws upon not only diverse literary forms such as epics, religious conduct books, romances, lives, novelettes, and works in popular periodicals but also the latest studies [End Page 475] of such allied fields as historiography, and political and social thought. As impressive as its breadth are, its detailed analysis and assessment of works epitomizing the different stages in the evolution of the genre. The result is a finely argued, meticulously documented work, the first to present a diachronic as well as a synchronic estimation of the Filipino novels. One therefore has to reject the author's modest declaration that it "is not the history of the Filipino novel, it is a contribution to the writing of that history," to assert that it is the definitive work in the field. Abdul Majid B. Nabi Baksh University of Malaya Copyright © 1985 Purdue Research Foundation

Masking: Toward a Phenomenology of Exteriorization

N interpreter of ritual must pay serious attention to the surfaces of things. Even if one assumes that a ritual performance implies a deep structure, access to that structure leads through an exterior which, as Boehme and Paracelsus suggested, bears the of an essential interior. But reading a signature on an exterior is no easy matter. Only recently in the emerging field of kinesics have we begun systematically to write a grammar of gesture with sufficient precision that we might learn to speak as penetratingly of symbolic actions as of words and sentences. I think ritual studies ought ultimately to collaborate with anthropology and psychology in producing some rather careful, detailed microkinesic studies of religious body motion along the lines illustrated by Ray Birdwhistell's provocative analyses of diaper changing, smoking, and smiling in his Kinesics and Context.' Meanwhile, I would like to offer a broader phenomenological sketch of one kind of ritual gesture, namely, masking. By I mean to include what we ordinarily think of as masks, but I also intend to encompass any mode of facial stylization, including make-up and even the expressions we wear. My concern is not the ethnographic one of describing and classifying kinds of masks, nor is it the historical one of interpreting a set of masks in a specific temporal and cultural setting. Rather, I propose to inquire into the possibilities of the act of masking. My question is, In what ways might we interpret the act of donning a mask regardless of who wears it and what it looks like? I will offer here a typology of four moments in the masking process: (1) concretion, (2) concealment, (3) embodiment, and (4) expression. First, however, I must say a word about the problem of definition. It might seem a simple matter to decide what a mask is, but the variety of phenomena complicates the matter. The Dogon have a Great Mask (iminana) which is displayed every sixty years and which is nearly thirty feet long. Obviously, no one wears it. Yet it is a mask despite its lack of an animate human figure inside. Masks are sometimes treated as sculpture by art historians and aesthetic anthropologists, but such treatments ignore the illusion of wearableness which separates mask