Medical Anthropology, 34: 70–83, 2015 Copyright © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0145-9740 print/1545-5882 online DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2014.960564

The Emotional, Political, and Analytical Labor of Engaged Anthropology Amidst Violent Political Conflict Rosa Cordillera Castillo Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, The Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Given the harsh realities that people live through in southern Philippines, where there is rife human rights violations and violent political conflict, it becomes difficult and arguably unethical for anthropologists to assume a position of neutrality. Following calls for engaged anthropology, I contend that engagement entails simultaneously an emotional, political, and analytical labor and troubles the separation of the self and other. I suggest that a way to labor through these challenges of researching suffering, and the reciprocal obligations this implicates, is to utilize feminist reflexivity and epistemic reflexivity. These necessitate an objectification of the self and one’s intellectual field to achieve an epistemological break that would lead to an understanding of the other and their realities. Keywords epistemic reflexivity, feminist reflexivity, intellectual genealogy, native anthropology, Philippine anthropology

I made the mandatory courtesy call to the Kapitan’s [village leader’s] house upon my return to Balitabang1 to start my fieldwork in October 2012. The Kapitan, a man in his late 30s, often spoke figuratively, generously employing imageries and symbols to illustrate his point: “The people have been asking me when you will return since you left in March (2012). They thought you would never come back,” he told me. “I promised I will return,” I replied. “I could not come earlier because I had classes. And this time I will stay longer, if it is alright with you and the people here.” “Yes of course it is. You must know that we are MILF [Moro Islamic Liberation Front],” he said, looking at me searchingly. “I have no problem with that,” I assured him. “I am very thankful that you have accepted me in your village.” ROSA CORDILLERA CASTILLO is a doctoral fellow in anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. Her doctoral research was conducted with a Moro community in central Mindanao, the Philippines. Her research interests include violence and subjectivity, nationalism, resistance, the anthropology of emotions, and engaged anthropology. Address correspondence to Rosa Cordillera Castillo, Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, The Freie Universität Berlin, Altensteinstrasse 48, 14195 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]

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“We have suffered through the years of conflict,” he continued. “Bullets have no eyes; they do not choose whom to hit. For a long time, we’ve been left to our own devices, ignored, and without development assistance. Your willingness to stay here, somebody from Manila, means that we are now okay. You are like water that is watering a plant which is about to grow.”

The village of Balitabang and many other Muslim or Moro2 villages in Central and Southern Mindanao, Philippines, have been directly affected by the various wars that have erupted in the region in the decades-old conflict between Moro liberation fronts and the Philippine state. It is a conflict that traces its roots to the anti-Muslim policy of the Spanish colonizers at the turn of the sixteenth century (Che Man 1990). Although they had sovereign Islamic states actively trading within Southeast Asia prior to the arrival of the Spanish, subsequent generations of Muslims since have experienced economic, political, and sociocultural marginalization, with persistent anti-Muslim stereotypes. The colonization project was resisted by different ethno-linguistic groups of Muslims throughout the 300 years of Spanish colonial rule (Majul 1973). But it was only in the early 1970s, after a series of massacres of Muslims and at the height of the rampage of the Ilaga Christian vigilante group and Martial Law, that a unified Moro resistance was launched by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF)3 and eventually the breakaway and currently more dominant group, MILF, to defend Bangsamoro [Moro nation], Moro communities, lands, and Islam. Since then, armed conflict has erupted on average every three years. Rampant human rights violations mainly committed by state armed forces, sectarian violence, and internal displacements are common features of peoples’ everyday lives. In October 2012, the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro (FAB)—a framework for an eventual peace agreement with the MILF—was signed; the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) was subsequently signed in March 2014. But despite the relative peace as a result of the FAB and the CAB, sporadic shootouts, isolated bombings, warlords, feuds among certain Moro clans, clashes with a new breakaway group, and kidnappings are still common in the area, affecting Muslims, Christians, and indigenous peoples alike. Knowing this long history of violence, I reflected deeply on the Kapitan’s words. While it was clear to the residents that I was conducting academic research which they genuinely wanted to help me with, I also knew that they welcomed me because it was an opportunity for them to tell the wider public about their lives. They saw my presence as a source of hope and aid. It was apparent to me that reciprocity, in its various modalities, was implicit in my relationship with them. Given the harsh realities that my interlocutors experienced, it became difficult and arguably unethical to assume a position of neutrality in the face of the expectation or the hope for reciprocity, expectations that confront many anthropologists working on violence and suffering (cf. Daniel 1996, Scheper-Hughes 1995, Skidmore 2006, Speed 2006, Theidon 2001). This realization helped set the stage for my emotional, political, and analytical responses in the field, and triggered the urge to reflect deeper on what ‘witnessing’ and ‘engagement’ meant as key categories of anthropological research amidst violent political conflict.

DEFINING EMOTIONAL, POLITICAL, AND ANALYTICAL LABOR Medical anthropology and the anthropology of violence have significantly contributed not only to developing the concepts of violence and suffering but also to how one can engage with suffering

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interlocutors. Positing suffering as social, political, and cultural matters resulting from political, economic, and institutional power dynamics removes analytical understandings of suffering from the bounds of the individual and the medical (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997:ix, xxiv). Interrogating the structures that produce suffering, such as in political conflict, opens the research on suffering to moral and political self-questioning involving the anthropologist. My particular persuasion follows the call of Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois for anthropological witnessing that “positions the anthropologist inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally or politically committed being” (2004:26). But how can one achieve the balance of witnessing, of engagement, and reciprocity, and at the same time produce a methodologically sound study in a politically volatile and dangerous situation? Of the numerous meditations on this dilemma by anthropologists that focus either on the act of engagement itself, on the analytical advantage of engaging, or on the emotional aspect of researching suffering, but rarely on the three together, what I offer here is a dissection of the process of my coming to terms with all such facets implied in expectations of reciprocity and engagement. In taking these three together, I am influenced by Hage’s (2010) approach to understanding the researcher’s emotional responses during participant observation. Among his insights, he states that the ethnographer is simultaneously participating in three modes of reality: the emotional, the political, and the analytical. Further, reflecting on his own upbringing as a Lebanese migrant and leftist academic in the United States to understand Lebanese Muslim immigrants’ political emotions in the wake of Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006, he notes that despite sharing political emotions with our interlocutors, there are limitations to such identification depending on our position in the relations of power.4 I build upon these particular insights of Hage (2010) for the assessment of my own emotions in in the field, which I refer to as ‘emotional labor,’ a term I borrow from Lee-Treweek (2000) who asserts that the ethnographer’s emotions must be seen as data. This echoes the calls of Davies (2010) and others to retrieve emotions from the margins of ethnographic method, seeing them as assisting rather than impeding understanding during fieldwork. However, I extend the emotional laboring process to the political and analytical, where I argue that the process of engaging in reciprocal relations while researching experiences of violent political conflict entails, simultaneously, an emotional, political, and analytical labor. They are forms of labor because the researcher must work through these challenges of researching suffering, and the reciprocal obligations they implicate, in order to make them epistemologically and methodologically relevant. Emotions, political action, and analysis are thus intertwined in the act of engagement and often occur simultaneously. However, the relationship between these three types of labor is rife with tensions brought about by the necessity to engage in an intellectual endeavor in the midst of painful emotions and political engagement. Furthermore, the decision to engage, the dilemmas related to engagement one faces, and the configuration of the laboring process involved, are influenced by one’s positionality and situatedness, the research context including its security risks, and the stakes of the research. In my case, my positionality and intellectual genealogy were complicated further by my multiplex subjectivity as both ‘the self’ and ‘the other,’ in the sense that my interlocutors and I were entangled in the same society and politics where we face partly converging and partly differing risks and stakes. I suggest that a way to labor through one’s emotional, political, and analytical responses in researching suffering is to utilize feminist reflexivity and Bourdieu’s epistemic reflexivity. These necessitate an objectification of the self and one’s intellectual field to achieve an epistemological break, a reflexive breaking from one’s presuppositions (Bourdieu 1977:1–3), so as to lead to an understanding of the other and their realities.

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In the following sections, I discuss how I utilized feminist and epistemic reflexivity as a way to work through my emotional and political responses in the field to make them analytically valuable. Part of this is the tracing of my own intellectual genealogy, which I later tie in with a specific case of engagement—the challenges of remembering and representing the Malisbong massacre of 1974—where I demonstrate the labors of researching suffering. I close this article with reflections on the particular stakes faced by a ‘native’ or ‘halfie’ anthropologist, and how this implicates and complicates the researcher’s epistemic and social distance as well as political responsibilities.

LOOKING WITHIN TO LOOK WITHOUT I had set out to write my dissertation on how subjectivities are produced in the context of the Moro conflict, by looking at the links between imagination, representations of the conflict, emotions, and actions. My desire to understand subjectivity amidst violence, and how to respond to suffering, was a purposeful trajectory of my lived experience and ‘intellectual genealogy.’ Sanford (2006:7) calls for tracing our “intellectual genealogy and our lived experiences not only as anthropologists and field researchers but also as political subjects with histories that have shaped us as human beings and as anthropologists.” Following Angel-Ajani, Sanford muses that “perhaps our own subject positions raise different and difficult questions in our research and analysis” (7), a problem articulated by feminist writers who interrogated the epistemological and political value and impact of our positionality. In her famous formulation, Haraway (1988) argues for situated and embodied knowledges as a way toward ‘feminist objectivity,’ for the recognition that we always speak from somewhere and not nowhere, hence our perspectives are always partial. Bourdieu’s epistemic reflexivity that questions the social conditions of knowledge production parallels and reinforces this feminist way of knowing. Bourdieu (1990) pointed out that to arrive at understanding, researchers need to enact an epistemological break from their preconstructions by objectifying their ‘objectivist relation’ to the people with whom they work. This objectivist relation “implies distance and externality” (36) where the detached researcher “conceives of the social world as a spectacle” (52). And similar to the call for tracing our intellectual genealogy, Bourdieu (2003:284) proposed the need for “participant objectivation” to further engender an epistemological break. This is to objectify the intellectual field from which the researcher is embedded and his or her position in it, to unearth the “academic unconscious” (285) that frames our understanding. Taking Bourdieu and feminist reflexivity as a guide for balancing the looking within with the looking without is a central part of the laboring process. I therefore ask these questions: What is my relationship to the people I study? What is my social distance from them? What are our respective positions in the social structure? How do these and my intellectual field and personal upbringing frame my understanding of the other, of which my emotional responses and political acts during fieldwork are part? And how does this awareness of my framing enable me to understand my interlocutors based on their realities? In practical and political terms, tracing my intellectual genealogy and objectifying myself meant the interrogation of my motivations for my research, the prism through which I gauged and negotiated the expectations and risks of fieldwork, and the way my positionality mediated my interaction with my interlocutors. All of these ultimately fed into the laboring process as defined above. Throughout the course of my research, my intellectual genealogy, positionality, and situatedness influenced not only my political and analytical labors but my emotional responses and interactions in the field as well.

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MY INTELLECTUAL GENEALOGY Growing up in Manila, I was no stranger to government tactics of counter-insurgency and human rights violations. My parents fought against the Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s and both of them were arrested. I grew up with my mother who, as a social scientist, teaches and advocates critical and feminist theories as well as ethics, and is an active advocate of women’s and indigenous peoples’ rights. Because of this, I was aware of issues on inequality and injustice at a young age and participated in the student activist movement at the University of the Philippines, a university which is a known hotbed of activism, producing leaders of both the left and the right movements. Marxism, class struggle, the ‘pyramidal structure’ of Philippine society, and ‘development aggression’ were common discussions among student activists. To a certain extent, state repression was also part of my lived experience. I had acquaintances and colleagues harassed by state forces, tortured, killed, or disappeared. I was interrogated by soldiers in the mountains and knocked to the ground by policemen in a rally that was violently dispersed in Manila. The former happened in 2011 when I went to the island of Mindoro to fetch my mother’s students, who had been conducting research in a remote village of indigenous Mangyans. There, around 20 fully armed soldiers interrogated us amidst the cold winds and rains, asking us the same questions over and over again. My knees were shaking hard from fear and the cold rain, knowing very well that they could easily falsely accuse us as being communist rebels. Not only did I feel powerless, I also purposively displayed powerlessness to not aggravate them. The interrogation ended, but I feared for the people in the village, as they would bear the brunt of the soldiers’ abuses after we leave. My experiences, and those of others around me, made me highly critical of the government that is well known for corruption and violence. This led me to my current research questions and acts of engagement. After university I joined a nongovernmental organization (NGO) involving anthropologists doing applied work for indigenous peoples who were struggling for their right to land and self-determination. Thereafter I taught human rights, the plight of indigenous peoples, and applied anthropology, among issues, at the university while continuing my research on marginalized sectors of Philippine society. My embodied experiences of political violence provided me with knowledge of the violence of everyday life in the Philippines prior to commencing my doctoral research. Narayan (1993:678) wrote that “instead of learning conceptual categories and then, through fieldwork, finding the contexts in which to apply them, those of us who study societies in which we have preexisting experience absorb analytic categories that rename and reframe what is already known. The reframing essentially involves locating vivid particulars with larger cultural patterns, sociological relations, and historical shifts.” Prior knowledge of the realities we are investigating is indeed an advantage to understanding (Bourdieu 1999:618). There is however a danger of sliding into unquestioned familiarity, of assuming things are already understood by virtue of being ‘native.’ I further elaborate on this later in this article. Engaged scholarship is common in Philippine anthropology. Most Filipino anthropologists’ research agenda are driven by contemporary problems, and involvement in NGO, advocacy, and policy work is the norm rather than the exception (Abaya, Fernan, and Noval-Morales 1999). Writing about the shifting terms of engagement in Philippine anthropology, Abaya and colleagues observe that “as anthropologists today seek specific engagements in relation to the exigencies of both their milieu and métier, they inevitably realize that the anthropological practice of describing

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the world ought not to deter them from prefiguring ways of how it could be better lived” (7). Coming from this tradition of engaged and critical scholarship, coupled with my upbringing, meant that I viewed my research through a critical lens sensitive to exercises of power, abuse, and domination. I was willing to engage if asked. This willingness, however, was pregnant with dilemmas regarding the validity of methods and data in the act of engagement, potentially helping future oppressors, and endangering my security as the complexities of the field unfolded.

ENGAGEMENT, ACCESS, AND TRUST I conducted one year of fieldwork in the Cotabato region of southern Philippines from 2012 until 2014, based mainly in the Moro village of Balitabang. There I lived with a poor but respected family, but moved around wherever stories led me to other Moro villages and cities. During this period, I engaged in various ways by linking the community with an NGO assisting Martial Law victims, writing victims’ testimonies, giving advice about the Reparation Act for Martial Law victims, and frequently updating the villagers on the latest developments in the peace talks. Among NGO workers, I discussed ways to make the advocacy on the FAB more effective based on my knowledge of villagers’ readings and reactions toward it, and I actively participated in the public discourse on transitional justice. My willingness to engage in these ways and my presence in the village was read by my interlocutors as an act of solidarity. This strengthened my relationship with them, and they generously shared with me difficult aspects of their lives even outside of formal interviews, as it was clear that I was not just mining them for data but that I felt and showed concern at the unfolding of events. My solidarity with their suffering, my willingness to undertake specific forms of engagement, and the simple act of treating them kindly, facilitated the building of mutual trust and enabled my research to progress in a way that otherwise might have been impossible (cf. Speed 2006). Trust indeed could have been a potentially precarious issue during my research. Until now, mistrust abounds between Christians, Muslims, and indigenous peoples, a legacy of the explosion of sectarian violence in the late 1960s that continues to frame relationships in the present where violence—whether political, criminal, or sectarian, often braided into each other—persists. As an ‘outsider’ from Manila and a nominal Christian, I was often the recipient of curious questions regarding Christian practices and beliefs as well as, rarely, apprehension if I could be trusted. A village guard in Balitabang once told me, “Fear resided in our hearts because you are a different tribe. We were afraid you will tell the military about us.” In the same way that I was constantly observing people, they were constantly observing me and commenting on my behavior and character. As Usman, a battle-weary fighter of the MNLF in Palimbang, explained, he had carefully observed me throughout our interactions—an ability he learned while in the MNLF—and based on that reading, he knew I could be trusted. This turned me into kin, with all the protection and responsibility this entailed. Usman and his family eventually called me their little sister and gave me an amulet for protection, while the residents of Balitabang referred to me as the child of Babu Amina, my host mother, and ensured my security throughout my fieldwork. My relationships with my interlocutors, particularly those closest to me, thus formed an important part of my emotional and political labor. As I became more integrated into their families, I also became more emotionally involved and felt a stronger urge to engage. In our intersubjectivity,

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we had started to care for each other. Consequently, there was a need to labor through these emotional and political responses and encounters. This became even more pressing because beyond the kin relations we had established, many Moros I talked to in various villages, regardless of their social status, saw an avenue in me to let the atrocities that were committed against them to become part of official Philippine history.

THE MALISBONG MASSACRE: REMEMBERING AND THE URGE TO ENGAGE The very act of writing about terror and suffering is an act of engagement in itself (ScheperHughes 1995). For Skidmore (2006:47), who worked in Burma, “being an engaged anthropologist is to advocate for the histories of terror and misery to be retained in the contemporary world. These alternate readings of political power, legitimacy, and moral authority have the power to puncture the hegemonic reading of past and present created by the military regime.” To “puncture the hegemonic reading of past and present” and to provide an alternative truth to what has been written or omitted in official Philippine history is what was requested of me by my interlocutors in Palimbang, Sultan Kudarat, where over a thousand men were massacred by soldiers in 1974. Referring to this phase of my fieldwork, in the text that follows I lay out the emotional, political, and analytical labor involved in such an engagement, the value of feminist and epistemic reflexivity in the laboring process, and how specific emotions and political responses were configured as I interacted with my interlocutors in the wake of remembering the violent past. My introduction to Usman set the tone for my stay in Palimbang. It was never just going to be an intellectual endeavor. On the contrary, it was highly emotional and political too. He told me: “If you are going to interview us just so you can get money, forget it. Many NGOs and private individuals have come here asking for our story, taking a photo of the mosque (where much of the killings happened), and promising us projects that never materialized. Only they benefitted. We never got anything.” I nervously told him that I was just a student who was led to their place by stories from elsewhere, that I had been living in a Moro village for many months now, and that I wanted to find out their narratives of the massacre and how it was still part of the present. I explained that I could not promise anything except that I was going to return whatever I wrote about them and translate it into a language they could understand. Usman softened and told me, “That is good. We need that. There is no written record yet of what happened. We want the world to know what happened here.” He took me to various individuals, each with a tale to tell, each hoping that something would come out of their painful telling, for many the first time that they were narrating it to an ‘outsider.’ “It really happened,” they asserted, as though they thought I doubted the truthfulness of their stories. I listened with sympathy and empathy, shed tears with them, and by empathetic and careful listening was able to reassure those I interviewed that I recognize that it happened. They told me of a month-long killing spree by the Philippine Army aimed at decimating Palimbang of Moros, a historic place for the Bangsamoro struggle where Nur Misuari declared to the world the existence of the MNLF in 1973. In the early morning of September 24, 1974, during Ramadan, canyons from naval ships bombarded the villages, forcing the people to flee to the mountains. Hunger and deceptive announcements of peace from government officials led many of them to descend from the mountains and into the village of Malisbong. Here men were

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separated from the women, who were taken to the ships. The women were kept on the deck of the ships for two days, baking under the hot sun before being returned to the villages under the guard of the soldiers. The men, over a thousand of them, were herded into the mosque, starved, and killed, several at a time each day, until the final days when those left inside the mosque were gunned down. The decaying mosque with its bloodied walls stands to this day. The people refuse to tear it down or to renovate it. “So that we will never forget,” they repeatedly told me. It was difficult to listen to the details of the killings and abuses. Each story left me drained and heavy. The landscape was alive with memories, as Usman pointed out to me where this or that person was killed and where the frontlines of the battles were. His grandfathers were killed and buried on the very land where I was staying. When I finally talked to Abbas, another resident of Palimbang, I was emotionally and mentally tired. I was angry at the soldiers and the government, sad and pained at the suffering of my Moro interlocutors, and incredulous that this massacre was never part of the country’s official history, of my history. I worried that I would never be able to adequately capture in writing their lived experience, and that I would never be able to reciprocate in an effective manner their willingness to excavate their painful memories for my research. I was anxious about the responsibility to tell the world what happened. As I grappled with my anxieties and decisions, I was acutely aware that I did not want to reproduce the false hopes and failed hopes given by others before me. Of all the interviews I conducted in my months of moving around Cotabato, Abbas’ narrative pained me the most. He was the only one I interviewed who was actually inside the mosque when the killings were happening. He was 13 years old at that time and had gone up the mountain when the bombardment started. But his father who was in Malisbong sent for him to come down because he thought that the conflict had ended. Inside the mosque, they soon realized that those ordered to go outside by the soldiers were being killed off. Abbas explained: “One could not do anything. Whether you like it or not, you have to obey the military’s orders (to leave the mosque and be shot outside).” “Did you discuss anything among yourselves when you realized what was happening?” I asked. He answered, “My father told me, ‘Son, I wish I had never asked you to come down here.’” At this point Abbas broke off into a quiet sob. I cried too. It was painful to see his pain, to witness the moment of powerlessness captured in his narrative and emotions. After a very long moment when neither of us were able to speak under the weight of difficult emotions and our own memories, I told him he did not need to continue and assured him that it happened in the past and we are now in the present. When he finally composed himself, he said: “Let’s continue . . . Even if it is painful for me to remember the massacre, as though I am seeing the people still alive, I will still tell you my story. I want the world to know what happened. And that it truly happened. It should be part of history.” His pain ‘marked’ me. I started writing their stories immediately. I was driven with urgency. I turned the individual stories into testimonies for victims’ application for the Reparation Act. I forwarded relevant materials about the Act to an NGO that committed to assisting the community in their application, returned the affidavits to the individuals I interviewed, and joined in the discussions among some residents about the importance of applying for reparation so that the government would recognize the injustice that had been done. I firmly believed they should, especially since my father was also applying for reparation as a political detainee during Martial Law.

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THE EMOTIONAL, POLITICAL, AND ANALYTICAL LABOR OF ENGAGED ANTHROPOLOGY Bourgois pointed out that “anthropologists cannot escape physically, ethically, and emotionally the suffering or the brutality of their research subjects and the historical epoch in which they live” (2006:xii), especially as participant observation is an embodied social practice predicated on the long-term cultivation of personal relationships in the field. I certainly could not escape the suffering of the people in Palimbang. I internalized it so much that it gave me body pains and nightmares. I knew that the only ethical and moral response to their willingness to tell me their stories was to engage, to stand with them in solidarity with their suffering, empathize, and accept the awful truth of their accounts. Engaged anthropology is an ‘emotional labor’ not only because of emotions’ epistemological relevance but also because they are taxing. Feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, pain, sadness, guilt, and anger figured in my engagement with my interlocutors. Some feelings, such as sadness, pain, and anger, enabled me to empathize with their suffering, collapsed the social, personal, and epistemic distance between us, entailed a mutual recognition, and made them open up to me. It was not a stretch for me to empathize and share their emotions. Even though I could never fully grasp the depths of pain of losing fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, and grandfathers in one short period of violence, nor could I share my interlocutors’ remembering of their dead loved ones suddenly alive in their act of telling, I could understand the fear and powerlessness of being in a situation with abusive elements of the armed forces. I drew from my biography as I listened to their stories with sincerity, and felt in my body the fear, impotent rage, and powerlessness of my encounter with the soldiers who interrogated us in the mountains of Mindoro. In our intersubjectivity, in the shared emotional space and ‘shared local moral world’ (Smith and Kleinman 2010), I was able to understand my interlocutors’ suffering and their motivations for their resistance at a deeper level. As I continued my research in the conflict-torn south, where I often had similar emotional moments that I shared with Abbas, I gradually understood the sense of powerlessness of those who went through violent displays of power by the state, and the desire to reclaim this power by any means possible. In 2011, my own sense of powerlessness was concretized by my overwhelming desire to reclaim power that was denied to me by the threatening interrogation of the soldiers. I reclaimed this power as soon as I could, by formally complaining to the town mayor and army general once we had left the mountains. I was in a position to do that as I had the capability and social standing to talk back. I was teaching at the University of the Philippines, and could flaunt this credential to my advantage. As I reflected on this event in my life vis-a-vis the experiences of my Muslim interlocutors, I realized that for many Muslims with whom I interacted, one of the ways through which power was exercised was in the ability to talk back to soldiers who entered their villages in search of the men. This was the ability to communicate either in Filipino, English, or Bisaya, the area’s lingua franca, which few in Balitabang were able to do. Stories about men and women who were able to negotiate with soldiers, thereby sparing the village or persons from harassment, and jokes about those who misunderstood what the soldiers said, punctuated people’s stories of violence. Furthermore, this inability to talk back and negotiate revealed the social position of Muslims in Philippine society, where they have either remained largely invisible or, in their visibility, were often portrayed negatively. The inability to talk back at the moment of violence, and the powerlessness this

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embodied, contributed to making armed struggle and jihad, often defined by my interlocutors as the struggle against oppression, the primary means through which the villagers reclaimed power. Hage (2010:149) argues for a continual critical reappraisal of our emotions in the field, by grounding “emotional identification in the existing relations of power, and in one’s location within and to these relations.” Taking this together with feminist and epistemic reflexivity, my understanding of my emotional moment with Abbas is grounded not on the projection of my emotions on my interlocutors but on my understanding of my and my Muslim interlocutors’ relative positions within our society’s power structure, and by locating that emotional moment within a wider web of ethnographic data, that is, the social logic through which this particular data made sense. It was also this kind of emotional identification that was engendered in me as I listened to stories of suffering that motivated me to engage with urgency. This political labor, however, required that I chose my ‘battles’ carefully. This was not only because I was conducting fieldwork in a politically volatile context with high risks to my security, but also because I did not want to be an instrument in creating a potentially oppressive system, particularly as I was in a complex entanglement with supporters of the MILF. In choosing when to act, I had veered between “self-silencing” (Low and Merry 2010:S212–213) and adopting a critical stance, indicating the moral ambiguities that at times punctuate our everyday engagements with our interlocutors. Low and Merry (2010:S212213) have pointed out that there is ambivalence in engagement and that there are times when the researcher practices self-silencing when his or her agenda is different from her interlocutors. In such instances there is an inability to speak. My self-silencing was, however, directed only to specific others at the moment of specific incidents and interactions. Beyond these encounters, I argue for a critical stance in engaging with our interlocutors, to interrogate power relations even among those who have suffered in order to not reproduce suffering within their own social structure (cf. Low and Merry 2010). I had, for instance, expressed my criticisms of the MILF leadership and policies openly in provocative conversations with those closest to me in the village and among NGO workers, which, particularly for the residents of Balitabang who were non-elite members of the MILF, engendered self-reflexivity in a climate of often unquestioning acceptance of MILF policies and leadership. It was clear to me that my solidarity and vigilance were to those who experienced and continue to experience persecution and violence and that I wanted to understand and critique the structures and policies that allow such violence to persist. This was regardless of who was committing that violence, whether the liberation fronts or the state forces. To participate in public discourse about pressing issues and to offer opinions and stances are part of the relationships we forge with our interlocutors and often an inescapable responsibility and expectation. Ideally, what distinguishes anthropologically informed opinion and political action is its strict adherence to empirically based stances and statements, especially as it is often the anthropologist who is closest to the ground while engaged in scientific endeavor. My position adheres to feminist epistemology, which embraces political action and departs from Bourdieu, who was critical of scholars taking a political stance as this might lead them to stop their intellectual inquiry (Hage 2010:150). This is not necessarily so. Whenever I was asked to engage, I instinctively asked myself whether I would be sacrificing the scientific merit of my research, thereby never abandoning my researcher self. The tension of whether I was disengaging from my scientific work as I engaged politically, emotionally, and morally was always present in my

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fieldwork, since as a PhD student I was also juggling the academic demands of my current institution in Germany, which lacked the same engaged scholarship tradition as Philippine anthropology. I was ambivalent at times, trying to pull myself out of a political and emotional soup in order to labor analytically, as though these could be easily separated. In reality, these three forms of labor often occurred simultaneously even though their relationship with each other could be fraught. Hage (2010:150) asserts that the researcher is pulled stronger into a society once he or she shares her interlocutors’ emotions and moods, which in turn implies a much deeper immersion, and that it takes much more effort to remove oneself for observational/analytical purposes. I knew that I had to step back when I found myself feeling guilty whenever I started to analyze what the people were saying to me, as though in trying to theorize their suffering I was in violation of their willingness to relive their pain. In order to dissipate my feelings of guilt, which were crippling my thought processes, I prioritized the writing of the affidavits and the discussion of the Reparation Act that revealed important insights regarding people’s views on death, soul, emotions, and justice. Once I finished these tasks, I proceeded to analyzing my data with a clearer conscience. And at the end of each day, I would try to sift through my emotions, detach myself from them no matter how difficult, and look at them and the day that passed more critically and analytically. Like Hage (2010), I was participating in three modes of reality in the conduct of my fieldwork: the emotional, the political, and the analytical. In my case, my participation was rife with the tensions and dilemmas of wanting to be a good researcher while I was, at the same time, pulled toward engagement.

TROUBLING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN THE SELF AND THE OTHER As already indicated, the configurations of my emotional, political, and analytical labor largely drew from my intellectual genealogy, my relationships with my interlocutors, and my understanding of the research context. The responses of my interlocutors to me, in turn, were mediated by how they perceived me to be—my personality, my religion, my intellectual and economic background, and my politics. Deploying Bourdieu’s epistemic reflexivity and feminist epistemology enabled me to work through and negotiate the relationships between these three labors. Reflecting on one’s positionality, epistemological baggage, and relationships with one’s interlocutors is a central part of the laboring process. I was in that uneasy position of being both the self and the other, the simultaneity of which differs from situation to situation. This positionality, variously referred to as ‘native anthropologist,’ ‘halfie,’ or ‘indigenous anthropologist,’ albeit with nuances and contestations in their conceptualizations, point to how “the Other is in certain ways the self” (Abu-Lughod 1991:141). Narayan (1993), who argues against the fixity of the distinction between a ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ anthropologist, offers a thoughtful dissection of the complexities of the researcher’s subjectivities in the field. She points out that “every anthropologist exhibits what Rosaldo has termed a ‘multiplex subjectivity’ with many crosscutting identifications (1989:168–195). Which facet of our subjectivity we choose or are faced to accept as a defining identity can change, depending on the context and the prevailing vectors of power” (676). She adds, “Given the multiplex nature of identity, there will inevitably be certain facets of self that join us up with the people we study, other facets that emphasize our difference” (680).

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This positionality of being both the self and the other contributed to configuring my emotional, political, and analytical labor because it implicated my epistemic and social distance to my interlocutors and the object of my study, violence. During fieldwork, there were instances when social, personal, and epistemic distance collapsed, sometimes partially and sometimes completely, as my interlocutors and I shared certain emotional moments brought about by our prior if separate experiences and knowledge with violence, or shared the stakes of the events happening in our society. This sharing allowed me to identify with them and vice versa. This distance, however, was never fixed. It shifted from situation to situation, from person to person, and from one intellectual endeavor to another, such as from the act of fieldwork to the act of analyzing. While in the former one is not always aware of the degree of distance between self and other, the latter always requires a conscious distancing, an objectification of things said, done, and felt, in order to effect an epistemological break, prevent an easy slide into unquestioned familiarity, and therefore connect these moments, emotions, acts, and narratives to the wider social logic in which they are embedded. Despite being born and raised in the Philippines, understanding a common language, and looking more or less like my interlocutors, I was still the Christian other to their Muslim selves; or they the Moro other to my Filipino self. It was a difference that was played out every day in each prayer in which I could not participate, in each discourse about differences in our religions, and in each comment about Christians who killed Moros in the 1970s. I was also the ‘outsider’ from Manila, a place from which decisions that have profoundly affected them emanated. Manila evoked images of progress and wealth to their impoverished village life and I, by extension, evoked the same in them. It evoked the power to do something, which they believed I represented. Yet I was also partially the self, a feeling of connection and identification that became more pronounced in certain instances such as during the reliving of painful memories with which I could empathize and relate to primarily because I have lived through some form of state violence. Like Narayan (1993:674) who shares an “unspoken emotional understanding” with the people with whom she worked in her own country, I too felt that way. The self also became more pronounced at critical events such as during the signing of the FAB. I had a stake in the unfolding of events and my concern and responsibilities went beyond the boundaries of my academic work. Furthermore, to a certain extent, I continue to share with my interlocutors the long-term risks of political violence as I do not have the luxury of permanently leaving the country. And even if I am not physically in the Philippines, my family is, and they are therefore exposed to risks that could derive from my research. This possibility of becoming the victim of violence enriched my insights regarding the inescapability of violence, its reach into spaces beyond the immediate confines of the conflict, and the fear and anxiety that go with this realization. It also strengthened my desire to contribute to understanding violence and to look for ways to put an end to it. Jones (1985), paraphrasing T. N. Madan, notes that “the native or indigenous anthropologist has a stake in the nature of his society, and he must, therefore, become an agent of social change, give a push to history in a particular desired direction” (61). However, how to be a social change agent while conducting an intellectual inquiry in the context of security risks and political violence is not so clear-cut and easy to decipher. One must labor for it emotionally, politically, and analytically. But the desire for a better future for one’s own society is very much present. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the work of many ‘native’ or ‘halfie’ anthropologists are not just intellectual inquiries but political acts as well.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Hansjörg Dilger, Susann Huschke, Dominik Mattes, Lenore Manderson, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this paper.

NOTES 1. The names of all villages (except that of Malisbong) and persons are pseudonyms. Malisbong is not anonymized in honor of the massacre survivors’ request to let the world know what happened to them. 2. ‘Moro,’ a term coined by the Spanish colonizers, carried imageries of wild, uncivilized, and violent peoples, actively propagated by the Spanish colonizers as the antithesis of the ‘civilized’ Christian Filipino (Blanchetti-Revelli 2003:48). It was eventually appropriated by Muslims in their assertion for a separate nationality (55). My interlocutors in North Cotabato alternately referred to themselves as Muslim, Maguindanaon, and more commonly as Moro, the political self-referent. 3. The Moro political movement is not monolithic. Divisions along ethnic lines occur with the MNLF mainly led by the Tausug and the MILF mainly led by the Maguindanaoans. There was also accommodation by some Muslim elites of the colonial rule and of the Filipinization project (Abinales 2000). 4. Influenced by Bourdieu, Spinoza, Lacan, and Nietzsche, Hage defines political emotions as “those emotions related to our sense of power over ourselves and our environment as we pursue those goals, ideals and activities that give our life meaning” (2010:141–142).

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