Communication Skills II

Patricia B Arinto

University of the Philippines

OPEN UNIVERSITY
Communication Skills II
By Patricia B. Arinto

Copyright © 2001 by Patricia B. Arinto

and the University of the Philippines Open University

Apart from any fair use for the purpose of research or private study,
criticism or review, this publication may be reproduced, stored
or transmitted, in any form or by any means
ONLY WITH THE PERMISSION
of the author and the UP Open University.

Published in the Philippines by the UP Open University

Office of Academic Support and Instructional Services
2/F, National Computer Center Building
C.P. Garcia Avenue, Diliman, Quezon City 1101
Telephone (632) 426-1515
Email [email protected]

ISBN 978-971-767-149-4

First Printing, 2001

Layout by Helen M. Creer

The development and preparation of this module was made possible by a grant
from Metrobank Foundation, Inc.

Printed in the Philippines

 Table of Contents

Unit I The Report, 1

Module 1 Selecting Your Sources, 3

Objectives, 3
Locating Your Sources, 3
Evaluating Your Sources, 5
Annotating Your Sources, 9

Module 2 Recording information, 13

Objectives,13
Summarizing, 14
Working with levels of generality, 16
Coming up with high level names, 17
The note-taking strategy, 19
Paraphrasing, 22
Quoting, 25
Direct Quotations, 27
A Note About Notecards, 29
Recap, 30

Module 3 Writing the Report, 31

Objectives, 31
Reported Speech: A Basic Feature of Academic Writing, 31
Beginning Your Report: Introducing Your Source, 33
Organizing Your Report: Coming Up With a Strong Topic, 36
Making Connections: Coherence in a Report, 41
Documenting Your Report, 42
Source notes, 42
Bibliographic/reference list entries, 43

Unit II The Critical Essay, 45

Module 4 Developing a Critical Stance, 47

Objectives, 47
Going beyond summarizing, 47
Strategies For Taking a Critical Stance, 48
Examining the evidence, 48
Looking at connections, 49
What about the other side?, 50
Assessing generalizability, 50
Some examples, 51
Appendix 4-1 Statements of Fact vs. Statements of Opinion, 55
Appendix 4-2 Statements of Convention vs. Statements of Preference, 61
Appendix 4-3 Fallacies, 67
Some common fallacies, 71
Module 5 Writing the Critical Essay, 77
History and Moral Identity:
The Challenge of the Philippine Centennial*, 80
Clinton in Barong Culture and
Globalization in the Time of APEC, 89
APEC the ideology of globalization, 89
Globalization is not homogenization, 91
Neocolonialism transformed, 93
Global babbling, 94
Nationalism as difference, 96

Unit III The Concept Paper, 99

Module 6 An Introduction to the Concept Paper, 101

What is a Concept?, 101
Defining Key Terms, 102
Exploring Relationships Between Ideas, 109

Module 7 The Concept Paper II: Conceptual Frameworks, 113

Objectives, 113
What is a Framework?, 113
An Example of a Conceptual Framework, 114
A Second Example, 126
The Research Proposal, 141
 Unit 1
The Report

I ’m sure that at this point in your academic career, you will have written
dozens of reports. Even as early as Grade 3, children are asked to write
some report or other, whether it is an account of a personal experience,
such as in a theme essay on “What I did During My Summer Vacation,”
or a list of facts gathered from various sources about a historical figure.

So why study the report at this point, you ask. The answer lies in the fact
that in the university, the report is so common as to be practically a
language or way of communicating. It is not an occasional activity, but a
way of life. You are asked to report in practically all courseshistory,
biology, anthropology, literature, art studies, architecture. And you report
practically every day, whether you are aware of it or not. What do I mean?
Well, is it not that even during class discussions, you are asked what so-
and-so said in her article, or to explain author X’s classification of leaders,
or to summarize in your own words for the rest of the class the definition
of sustainable development given by authors M and N? And then during
exams, you are asked to synthesize the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke and
Rosseau, or to trace the evolution of the democratic form of government,
or to explain how the postmodern novel differs from the classic realist
text.

The report is something you’re expected to produce with some degree of

flair, with sophistication even. The written reports especially are supposed
to contain information from not just one or two sources but from at least
five sources. These are reports that are not just a patchwork of material
quoted from here and there but entirely new works that are creative, well-
synthesized, and just as good (if not better) accounts as your original
sources. For the report at the university level is a means not only of
reproducing knowledge but also of producing it.

Tall order, huh? But don’t be intimidated. We’ll take this business of report
writing one step at a time, beginning with locating and evaluating sources
of information; taking down notes from your sources, including
summarizing and paraphrasing and quoting; writing the report; and finally
documenting your sources.
We’ll take for granted for the moment that the subject matter or topic of
the report is one that is assigned by the teacher or professor. It is not
something you choose yourself from out of the blue, or if you do choose it,
your choice is one of several topics in the course outline drawn up by your
professor. In any case, let us assume that you have a given topic.

Let us also assume that your report is expected to be an account of what

written sources have to say about the subject matter. You are not being
asked to give an account of something you experienced, as in an experiment
or a participant observation project. Neither are you being asked to
interview people about what they have experienced or what they know
about the subject matter. These two types of report you will certainly be
required to write sometime in your college career, but usually later, after
you have gone through special courses on qualitative and quantitative
methods of research. You will find that in the university, asking people
what they think of something is not just a matter of standing in a street
corner and accosting every passersby with your question. Neither is it as
simple as interviewing the people you know and then recording their
answers. There is a science to interviewing and to conducting surveys
that you have to learn, and you will do so in a course or two devoted only
to this.

On the other hand, the report that requires you to read various written
sources of information is fairly universal in college, and you are required
this type of report even as early as your freshman year. So this will be our
focus of study in this course.
 Module 1
Selecting Your Sources

Locating Your Sources

Let’s say you are asked to write a
comparative report about the incidence of Objectives
poverty in the Philippines in three
administrations—that of Cory Aquino, After studying this module,
Fidel Ramos, and Joseph Estrada. you should be able to:

What is one obvious source of information 1. Find bibliographic

for this report? The newspapers, you say? sources of information
That’s right. You will certainly find news for a report; and
stories on all three topics. But that’s just one 2. Evaluate whether a
source. And it is a limited source in the bibliographic source is
sense that newspaper articles are reliable.
themselves reports, or accounts of
information taken from other sources. So
even as you note information taken from newspaper accounts, also take
note of the sources of information used so that you can look these up
yourself, if necessary. Since it is a requirement of journalistic reportage to
always state their sources, you should find this type of information clearly
stated.

The newspaper reports on poverty incidence will probably cite as one

source statistics from the National Economic Development Authority
(NEDA). This is a matter of public record and it should be readily available
to you, either at the NEDA office itself or at its website. NEDA statistics
4 Communication II

are also reported by the National Statistics Office. The NEDA is a

government organization, and it presents data generated using specific
measures or instruments and for certain purposes. Other organizations
will have gathered statistics on poverty and it would be worth your while
to look up their own reports. Some of these reports are those by the
Philippine Human Development Network, Ibon Data Bank, Social Weather
Stations, the World Bank, to name a few.

There will also be studies on poverty incidence published in academic

journals, which are journals that feature research-based articles by
academics or University-based writers in the different disciplines or areas
of study (examples of disciplines are Biology, Economics, Art Studies).
There are several journals for every discipline, and you will find these in
the serials section of the library. For our example on poverty incidence,
you should be looking into economics journals, such as the:

1. Philippine Review of Economics and Business

2. Journal of International Development
3. Asian Development Review

You should also be looking for books on the subject. If you look under
“poverty” in the subject catalog in the UP library, you should find the
following entries, among others:

1. Arsenio M Balisacan and Shigeaki Fujisaki’s Causes of Poverty: Myths,

Facts & Policies (A Philippine Study), published by the UP Press in 1999
2. Ruth S. Callanta’s Poverty: The Philippine Scenario, published by
Bookmark in 1988
3. Ponciano Intal and Ma. Cynthia Rose Bautista’s Understand Poverty
and Inequality in the Philippines: A Compendium of Policy and
Methodological Perspectives, published by NEDA and UNDP in 1994

Box 1-1 summarizes what we’ve discussed about locating sources of

information.

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 Unit I Module 1 5

Box 1-1. Some guidelines for locating sources

1. Check out the subject catalog in the university and college

libraries and make a shortlist of book titles that you find there.
You can also check out other libraries and databanks of
organizations or institutions working in the subject area to
which the report topic belongs.
2. Read the journals on the discipline. Look for journal articles.
Even if the journal articles themselves do not contain
information you can use, or cite in your own essay, they will
provide you with a bibliography. Read the bibliography/works
cited section and then look for the titles included there.
3. Contact experts on the subject matter and ask them for a list of
references/sources.
4. Do a search on the Internet. Use search engines such as Yahoo
and Google. Type a specific enough search word or phrase
and then examine the search results that come up. (See Box 1-
3, in the next section, for how to evaluate Internet sources.)

Can you add other guidelines?

Evaluating Your Sources

The question that you may be asking now is, why do I have to look for all
these other sources? Isn’t the newspaper report enough?

Well, you will discover that in academe, one source is never enough.
Academics are skeptics. They can’t quite take information at face value.
The source of information is always a matter to be evaluated. Plus,
academics know that it doesn’t do to draw conclusions from just one set
of information. Information is not neutral. It is packaged or put together
according to a certain framework or way of looking at things. And in this
age of information, there is a slew of information about every little thing.
While this is a good thing—it’s certainly better than not having any source
at all, or having only one or two—it presents its own set of problems, chief
of these being how do we figure out which source to take seriously.

Boxes 1-2 gives some guidelines on how to evaluate sources.

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6 Communication II

Box 1-2. Tips for coming up with a shortlist of sources

1. Choose sources that are recent. I suggest you look for sources
published not earlier than 10 years ago. In this Information
Age, knowledge is growing at a rapid pace and information
on a subject matter is constantly being updated or revised.
2. The author should be an expert in the subject matter. To
determine this, read the note about the author. You could also
do an independent search for information about the author—
say on the Internet.
3. Check whether the book/publication has been reviewed and
by whom. The chief reviewer usually writes the foreword to
the book, and sometimes the introduction. Sometimes, blurbs
from independent reviewers are included in the flyleaf or back
cover. Are the reviewers experts in the subject matter that is
the publication’s focus? You could also look for reviews of the
source in journals (of the discipline) and on the Internet.
4. Publications that make a significant contribution to the
literature on the subject matter are usually referred to in other
publications on the subject matter. This is another way of
figuring out the credibility of a source—that is, by the references
made to it by other sources.

Can you suggest other tips to add to this list?

Box 1-3 lists some guidelines for evaluating informational websites or

sources on the Internet. Pay attention to the word “informational.” The
Edison Initiative of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee classifies
websites into informational, news, advocacy, personal, and business
websites. Your best bet for information you can use in academic reports is
the informational website. The tips in Box 1-3 are taken from the Edison
Initiative’s website for evaluating web sources at http://www.uwm.edu/
letsci/edison/webevaluation/index.html.

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 Unit I Module 1 7

Box 1-3. How to evaluate informational websites

An informational web site’s primary purpose is to present factual information.

Most informational sites are sponsored by professional organizations, government
agencies, educational institutions, museums, or libraries. Many of these sites
present statistical data or other factual information such as reports, research, or
specialized information about a topic.

Examples . . .
Science—Global Warming: Goddard Institute for Space Studies, EPA Global
Warming
Social Science—Welfare Reform: MDRC-Welfare Reform, HUD-Welfare
ReformHumanities—Arts Funding: National Endowment for the Arts, The
Foundation Center

The more you answer “yes,” the greater the likelihood that the information is of
high quality.

AUTHORITY

l Is it clear who is responsible for the information on the site?

l Is there a link to a page describing the organization and its mission?
l Is there a way of independently verifying the legitimacy of the page’s
sponsor?
l Is contact information, including mailing address and phone number, readily
available?
l Is the copyright holder of the information easily identified?
l Is the page located on the organization’s web site?
l Is the copyright holder an established publisher or organization?
l Are individual authors of the pages listed?
l Are the author’s qualifications for writing on this topic clearly stated?
l Is the information well written?
l Is the information from a subscription database?

ACCURACY

l Are the sources for any factual information clearly referenced?

l Is the information free of grammatical, spelling, and other typographical
errors?
l Is the information presented part of the organization’s expertise?
l Is it clear who has the responsibility for the accuracy of the information?
l Are links provided to other sites present and are they relevant for the topic?
l Are links evaluated or summarized?
l If charts and/or graphs containing statistical data are presented, are they
clearly labeled and sources referenced?
l Does the page have a published date?
l Is the site well maintained and dates provided for revisions?

OBJECTIVITY

l Are the goals of the site clearly identified?

l Is the information provided as a public service?
l If an organization has a stake in the topic, is their interest in the topic clearly
stated?

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8 Communication II

l Is the information free of advertising?

l If advertising is present, is it clearly differentiated from the informational
content?
l Is factual information kept separate from interpretation?
l Are alternative points of view provided?
l Are opinions clearly identified?
l Is the text free of emotion and bias?

CURRENCY

l Are there dates on the page to indicate:

When the page was written?

When the page was first placed on the Web?
When the page was last revised?

l Are there other indications that the material is kept current?

l If statistical material is presented, is it clearly stated when the data was
gathered?
l Is the data provided the most current information on the topic?
l Are the links provided current and do they reference the most recent
information?
l Are links to additional information active?

COVERAGE

l Is the web site complete and not under construction?

l Does the information address all the relevant issues of the topic?
l Is the information correctly cited?
l Is there a clear indication of whether the entire work is available on the Web
or only parts of it?
l If significant topics are left out, are reasons for their absence presented?

Putting it all together

Authority. If your page lists the organization and author and provides a mailing
address and phone number to contact them, and . . .

Accuracy. If the page lists the organization’s and author’s credentials and the
page is properly referenced, and . . .

Objectivity. If the page provides accurate information and provides an objective

assessment of the information, and . . .

Currency. If the page provides current information that is updated regularly, and
...

Coverage. If the page is complete with few information gaps, and is well
referenced, then . . .

You may have a high quality informational web page.

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 Unit I Module 1 9

Annotating Your Sources

To annotate something is to make notes on it. Here I am not yet talking
about taking down notes from your sources. Instead, I am recommending
that you take down notes on or about the sources that have passed your
evaluation, your shortlist of possible sources. I’m recommending that you
come up with an annotated working bibliography or reference list.

A bibliography, aka reference list, is, simply “a list of books referred to by

a scholarly work, usually printed as an appendix” (to the scholarly work)
(qtd. in Guzman, 2000). Guzman makes a distinction between a tentative
bibliography, a working bibliography, and a final bibliography. The terms
are self-explanatory. But indulge my stating the obvious.

The tentative bibliography is the list of possible references that you come
up with as a result of your first forays in search of sources. The working
bibliography is that which you have shortlisted following the tips given
in the section on evaluating sources. The final bibliography is the list of
actual sources from which you got data or information you actually include
in your article or report. You arrive at the final bibliography after you
have actually written your report.

What I’m recommending now is that you note down the complete
bibliographic information about the sources you’ve shortlisted in 3” x 5”
index cards (one bibliographic entry per card), as well as your initial
findings about the usefulness of the source. In short, write down your
evaluation of the source following the guidelines on evaluating sources in
Box 1-2. Note as well any special features of the source that you noticed
during your initial evaluation of it (e.g., any promising sounding chapters
or sections). Your note can be in the form of a couple of sentences.

Why do this? Well, I don’t know about you but I’ve found myself forgetting
why I have chosen certain sources to read, especially when I’m confronted
with many of them. Also, I get intimidated by the stack of sources and
waste some time trying to figure out which one to start with. I flip through
each, unable to focus, until I start to panic because I’m not getting
anywhere and time is running short. Now if I had annotated each source
beforehand, my annotations will remind me which ones seemed the most
useful at the time I first examined these sources, and I can then begin with
those. Moreover, my annotation (if I did it right, of course) will direct me
to the sections of the source that I had observed in my initial inspection to
contain the kind of information I particularly need.

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10 Communication II

Here’s a sample annotated bibliographic entry:

Setsuho, Ikehata and Ricardo Trota Jose, eds. 1999. The Philippines
Under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction. Quezon City,
Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Annotation: This collection of essays presents the Japanese

perspective on the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. The
essays are written by Japanese scholars and one Filipino scholar
using unused Japanese sources. An article on the policy of
appeasement is included, as well as one on Filipino volunteer
armies or collaborators.

No, I did not have to read the book to be able to annotate it in this way. I
simply looked at the table of contents and the blurb at the back of the
book. The latter should be taken with a grain of salt as they are usually
intended to help sell the book. But if the blurb is a quote from the book
itself, then maybe we can suspend disbelief. An even better alternative is
to scan the book’s introduction. How did I know the articles in the book
were written by Japanese scholars? Well, the names told me, plus I scanned
the notes about the authors section. Altogether I spent about 5 minutes
evaluating the book and another 2 minutes to write down this annotation.

Are the index cards absolutely mandatory? Well, they do make for easier
handling. You can shuffle them and put them in your pocket. They’re
neater and not so easy to lose, unlike slips of scratch paper or pages in a
notebook containing 10,000 other notes.

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 Unit I Module 1 11

Activity 1-1
Below is a list of topics. Choose one topic and then come up with a
working bibliography of eight sources of information on the topic.

In choosing what sources to include in your working bibliography,

apply the principles of evaluating sources discussed in this module.

And then annotate each of the sources you have chosen.

Your tutor may require you to submit your working bibliography

in 3” x 5” index cards—one bibliographic entry per card—during
the First Study Session.

The topics to choose from are:

1. political awareness and involvement of the Filipino middle
classes
2. Japanese animé in Philippine popular culture
3. literacy and texting in the Philippines
4. mental health through the ages: changing perspectives
5. the politics of environmentalism

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 Module 2
Recording information

Y ou now have a shortlist of sources of

information for that report you’re
working on. So the next step is to start
Objectives
reading your sources and note down or After studying this module,
record information that you can include you should be able to:
in your report.
1. Summarize information
I’m sure you know that there are several from a source effectively
ways of recording information. The and efficiently;
“easiest” is to simply copy it verbatim or 2. Use your own words
word-for-word from the source. The word when summarizing and
“easiest” is in quotation marks because paraphrasing;
this method isn’t really easy at all. In fact, 3. Determine when to make
it only makes the process of writing the a direct quote, a
report longer and more tedious. Plus it paraphrase, or a
makes you vulnerable to charges of summary.
plagiarism.

First of all, you won’t be allowed by your teacher to just submit a patchwork
of quoted material. You are expected to come up with a coherent report
that includes information from various sources. If you simply string quotes
along, the report will not be coherent at all. Janet Giltrow, in her book
Academic Writing (1999), uses the following figure to illustrate why
stringing along quoted material won’t work:
14 Communication II

Original source Summary that copies important sentences

^^^^^^^^^^********^^^^^^^^^^ ******* ********** ******** ********

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^*******
**********^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^*********
******

Figure 2-1. Illustration of why copying key sentences

from a source won’t work

According to Giltrow, the ^^^^^^^^^^^ serves as the context for the

********. You appreciated the ******** precisely because you understood
them in context. But your summary doesn’t provide your readers that
context. So the ********* won’t make sense to your readers as well as they
did to you when you read them in the original passage.

The temptation to simply copy sentences from the original and string them
along comes from the mistaken notion that a report is nothing more than
a repetition, or reproduction, of the original material. In fact, says Giltrow,
when you make a report of something you have read, you are making
something new: “The material from the original text takes on a new form
to fit a new context.”

Summarizing
What is a summary? Well, as I’m sure you know, it’s a record of the
important or major ideas in a source. That is, it does not include the
supporting details for those ideas that were in the source. A summary is
also a restatement of those important ideas in your own words.

Let’s take this one at a time. First, finding the main ideas. How do you
know which ones those are?

If you said paragraphs usually have topic sentences, you’re quite right.
The topic sentence is the sentence that contains the key idea of the text. It
is also the most general of all the sentences, since the others are there in
support of the topic sentence.

But. Yes, but. To limit yourself to the topic sentence is to risk writing a
summary that’s too general, or vague. Consider this passage and the
summary that comes after it.

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 Unit I Module 2 15

Passage A: From “HIV/AIDS and the Challenge of Confronting its Stigmatization”

AIDS stigma has also considerable impact on persons with AIDS’ decisions
about disclosing their health status to others. Fearing rejection, discrimination,
hostility, mistreatment, and even physical violence, and desiring to avoid pity
from others and feeling concern about causing loved ones emotional pain,
many people keep their seropositive status a secret. These fears are not
without foundation, as the discovery of a person’s HIV status has been shown
to lead to a loss of family ties, friendship, employment, and housing, dismissal
from school, and denial of health and life insurance as well as health care.
Awareness of this discrimination results in substantial numbers choosing not
to disclose their status, with a number of important consequences. Foremost
among these is the effect of cutting off potential social support from family and
friends, which sustains psychological vulnerability, and interferes with the
potential for informal caregivers who can assist in providing tangible as well as
social support as illness progresses. HIV-positive persons who do not
disclose to significant others are likely to become more depressed and
anxious, more prone to loath or blame themselves, than those who selectively
report their condition to close and trusted confidants. Such feelings can
undermine their ability to seek medical care in a timely fashion. Or follow other
health practices essential to well-being. They become incapable of taking full
advantage of medical care for their condition. In some cases, they seek
treatment but pay for it directly in order to avoid disclosure to insurance
companies that could inform employers, diminishing as a result personal
resources for care, and finding that, often, they must limit treatment options.
There is also the matter of ongoing sexual relationship, in which HIV-positive
persons may avoid introducing safer behaviors because it raises questions
that could lead to disclosure. There is considerable evidence that HIV-positive
persons do not consistently disclose their serostatus with sexual partners,
whether primary, regular but not primary, and casual and anonymous partners.
For women, the consequences of disclosure can be particularly severe, as they
can lead to discovery of behaviors including drug use and prostitution that in
turn could precipitate the loss of custody of children. (356 words)

Summary #1:
The fear of the stigmatizing effect of having AIDS prevents many HIV positive
people from revealing their heath status even to people close to them. This in
turn has negative effects on their access to health care.

Is this all the original passage is saying? Wasn’t the original passage more
specific than this? In fact, some of the supporting sentences in a text flesh
out what a broad topic sentence says and thus contain key ideas too. So
you must take them into account when writing your summary.

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16 Communication II

Working with levels of generality

Giltrow’s advice is to pay attention to the levels of prose. Look for the
general words in a text and the specific words that refer to these general
terms. Actually, there are several levels of generality (or specificity). Make
a list that shows these. For Passage A, our list might include the following:

AIDS stigma
Fearing rejection, discrimination, hostility, mistreatment,
and even physical violence, and desiring to avoid pity from others
and feeling concern about causing loved ones emotional pain

Impact on decisions about disclosing health status to others

Keeping seropositive status a secret
Choosing not to disclose status

Important consequences
Effect of cutting off potential social support
from family and friends: vulnerability, self-loathing,
depression, anxiety

Undermining ability to seek medical care: buying medicine

on their own to avoid employers finding out,
limiting treatment options

Avoiding introducing safe sexual behaviors

Women with HIV: Fear of discovery of drug use and prostitution
Fear of loss of custody over children

In this passage, there are many levels of generality—from the most general
such as stigmatizing effects of AIDS, to the most specific such as losing
custody of one’s children if found to have AIDS. The question now is
choosing which ones to include in the summary. To choose only the most
general is to risk being vague.

Summary # 1 states the key idea of the passage but it does not communicate
the serious impact of non-disclosure of HIV status due to fear of the stigma
attached to having AIDS that is apparent from the specific cases cited in
the original passage. There is a need to include some of the details, but not
too much of these. To include too many specific details is to risk being
trivial. For example:

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 Unit I Module 2 17

Summary # 2:

Fearing rejection, discrimination, hostility, mistreatment, and even physical

violence, and desiring to avoid pity from others and feeling concern about
causing loved ones emotional pain, HIV positive persons often keep their
health status a secret even from their family and friends. Their fears are not
unfounded as many who are discovered to have AIDS end up losing their family
and friends, their employment and housing, and access to school and health
care. Rather than tell others, HIV-positive individuals end up isolating
themselves and thus becoming depressed and more anxious than ever before.
They buy their own medicines instead of having their insurance policy pay for
fear of the insurance company telling their employers, and they limit their
treatment options. The women don’t negotiate for safer sexual practices with
partners because they are afraid that they will be found out to be prostitutes or
drug addicts, and their children will be taken away from them. (155 words)

This second summary makes it sound like the examples of what HIV-
positive people do to avoid disclosure are general or true of all. In fact,
these are just examples that the writer of the original passage writes. Also,
it takes too many of the original passage’s words and phraseology. Consider
this third alternative summary:

Summary # 3:

Afraid of being shunned, ridiculed, maltreated, or pitied, many HIV-positive

individuals do not tell even people close to them about their health condition.
But not telling anyone makes them feel more isolated and helpless, which can
get in the way of care and treatment. For example, some choose to make do
with treatment that they can afford to pay for themselves, without assistance
from others. Many put up with unsafe sexual practices for fear of revealing their
health status to their partner. (82 words)

Observe the use of synonyms for the words and phrases in the original
passage. Also, the summary is only about a fourth of the original in length,
even as it includes all of the key points in the original passage.

Coming up with high level names

What about summarizing a text where the topic sentence is implied, rather
than explicitly stated? In such texts there are no general terms; everything
is a specific detail. Examples of texts like this are narratives and descriptive
passages. For these, Giltrow advises that you abstract the more general
idea from the specific details and provide high-level names for these ideas.
For example:

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18 Communication II

Passage B: From “Notes On My Life” by Gregoria de Jesus as translated by Encarnacion

Alzona

Original text High-level names

When I was about eighteen years old, young Courtship

men began to call at our house, and among
them was Andres Bonifacio, who came in
company with Ladislao Diwa and my cousin
Teodoro Plata, then clerk of court, but none of
them talked to me of love, since parents in those
days were extremely careful and girls did not Long courtship
want people to know that they already had
admirers. The truth, however, was that Andres Working for parental approval
Bonifacio had already informed my parents of
his intentions and for nearly a year had been
trying to win their approval, although I knew
nothing about it. Three months more elapsed
before I learned that my father was against
Bonifacio’s suit because he was a freemason, Paternal opposition
and the freemasons then were considered
bad men by our elders because of the
teachings of the friars; and at that time
precisely I was beginning to like him a little.
Six months later I had earnestly fallen in love Falling in love and winning
with him, and my father, though opposed at parental approval
first, in the end gave his consent because of
his love for me and because I told him frankly
of our love for each other.

In deference to my parents, we were married Church wedding for her

in the Catholic church of Binondo, in March parents’ sake
1893, with Restituto Javier and his wife
Benita de Javier as sponsors; but the week
following, we were married again in the Katipunan wedding
house of our sponsors on what was then
called Oroquieta Street before all the
Katipuneros at their request, since they did
not recognize as valid our marriage in the
Catholic church. I remember that there was
even a little dinner attended by, among others,
Pio Valenzuela, Santiago Turiano, Ramon Basa,
Marina Dizon, Josefa and Trining Rizal, and
nearly all the dignitaries of the Katipunan. On
the evening of the same day, I was admitted
into the Katipunan and assumed the symbolic
name of “Lakambini,” swearing to obey its rules
and fulfill its sacred purposes. (324 words)

Summary:
After a year-long courtship when she was only 18, during which he tried and eventually
succeeded in winning her parents’ approval, Andres Bonifacio and Gregoria de Jesus
got married. They had two weddings: one at a Catholic church, to please her parents,
and the other, held on the same day, a civil ceremony witnessed by Katipunan
members. She was then sworn in as a member of the organization. (68 words)

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 Unit I Module 2 19

The note-taking strategy

In making a summary, you are basically collapsing the original into a
portable package. This requires being able to:

l identify key points;

l figure out how these points are related; and
l restate these points in your own words.

Consider the example below:

Original Text Notes

The power of the photograph lies in its Photographs as

capacity to be invested with truth. Aside from bearers of truth Main topic
the cinema, photography comes closest to
portraying the “real.” A radical shift in
perception was created by the introduction of
the camera; never before had nature been
presented so “realistically.” The former
controversy over photography’s inclusion
within art stemmed from its apparent fidelity Photograph as 1st main
to reality, as opposed to painting, for faithful support
example. It was an act of blasphemy, representation of
especially when aided by machinery, a real object
newspaper had argued, to go against the
artist’s divine inspiration “to dare to
represent the divine-human features.”1

The ease with which the truth was attributed

to the photograph came from what was
believed to be equivalence of camera vision camera vision and
and human vision. Which Patricia Albers and human vision
William James call “photography’s basic considered
epistemological promise.”2 What one saw equivalent: what
in the pictures seemed to look exactly as it the camera sees
would in “real life.” The privileging of sight is also what the
among the human senses also contributed eye sees
to the overwhelming enthusiasm for the new
technique. Photography’s “realist” quality
made it easily utilizable by anthropologists,
or the police, for instance, as a means of
obtaining “knowledge.” This legacy stills
survives today in the admission of
photographs as legal evidence, in the use of use of 2 nd main
photographs for identification purposes, and photographs as support
the like. evidence

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20 Communication II

However, this truth is not merely located in the

finished product and/or the viewer alone. It
may be argued that “realism” can also be
located within the process of production itself.
The light entering the camera’s chamber, light illuminating
recording onto a light-sensitive material base the object
the positive or negative image of the photographed
photographed, is light that was coexisting proof that the 3rd main
with the photographed at the moment of its photographed support
production. As Roland Barthes writes: “The was really there
photograph is literally an emanation of the
referent. From a real body, which was there, photograph as
proceeds radiation which ultimately touch me, “certificate of
who am here…”3 Perhaps this explains the presence”
talismanic powers of photographs: the same
light “touches” both the photographed and the
viewer. From this link it is established that the photo attests to
photographed subject was undeniably the photographed
present in front of the camera. The object’s being
photograph, then, serves as a “certificate of really present
presence.”4

The photograph does not merely illustrate, or

represent, but also authenticates.5 The
viewer’s willingness to ascribe truth to the to see is to
photograph lies not just in the equivalence of believe
visions, but also in the certainty of presence.
The articulation of truth within the photograph
can also be seen in contrast with print: the
mere reading about a fact in print does not
completely confirm reality, but seeing that fact
captured in a photograph makes it seem
even more “real.”

One further factor may have secured the

relation between truth and photography: the camera
distancing of the producer from the considered more 4th main
photograph’s moment of production. It is the objective than any support
presence of a sophisticated—and mostly other recording
mystified—technological apparatus that technologies
creates this distance; the work, after all, is
performed by the ghost in the machine. The
separation of the producer from the
photograph implies that the possibility of it is the camera,
manipulation is reduced, and truth, therefore, not the camera
is more easily ascribed. Authority is ascribed man, who records
to the photograph for similar reasons—the
more objective, therefore the more
authoritative. (516 words)

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 Unit I Module 2 21

Passage C: From Displaying Filipinos by Benito Vergara

Column 1 of the table above is the text I am summarizing. In the second
column are my notes of the gist of each paragraph of the original or source
text. The gist is the main point. Note my effort to state this main point in
my own words. Also, I noted down the gist of each paragraph in sentence
fragments. Giltrow says this is one way of avoiding the temptation of
copying from the source. In the third column are my notes of how the
main points I identified are related to each other. Armed with these notes,
I can now write my summary.

My summary:
Photographs are considered to be bearers of truth in the sense that they are
faithful representations of reality. This in turn springs from the idea that the camera
sees objects the way the human eye does—that is, a camera sees objects that
are really there. That light is cast on the object being photographed is further proof
of its existence in the real world. It is moreover an objective proof, since the
camera limits the photographer’s capacity to manipulate the object. It is the camera,
not the cameraman, that records reality. (93 words)

Giltrow calls the strategy for summarizing that we used above the note-
taking strategy. We take note of the gist of each paragraph of the source
text. This allows us to:

1. check that we really understood the connections between each part of

the source text
2. check that we have really accounted for all parts of the source text
3. express the main points of the source text in our words, and therefore
avoid copying
4. manipulate and arrange the main ideas in a way that enables us to
express them briefly and coherently in a new text (that is, the summary)

The note-taking strategy is very useful for coming up with summaries of

long texts. Of course, it is not always necessary to do paragraph-by-
paragraph note-taking. When summarizing a really long article or chapter,
you can simply note down the gist of each page or section of the text. The
sections are usually labeled. But if you feel you’re losing track of the
discussion, says Giltrow, “you can always shift down to paragraph level,
registering each step of the discussion.”

Activity 2-1
Now do some summarizing of your own. Take a long-ish section
(at least three pages) from among the sources you annotated in
Activity 1-1 and write a one-paragraph summary of it.

UP Open University
22 Communication II

Paraphrasing
We have in fact been talking about paraphrasing in the section on
summarizing. For to paraphrase means to say something in your own
words. But in this section, I want to call attention to the fact that sometimes
we don’t keep only to the main points of a source. We want to highlight
something said by a source, such as an explanation, without necessarily
collapsing it into only its key ideas. But at the same time, we do not want
to simply quote the original passage for it is too dense, or it is written in a
style that makes it difficult to understand. Indeed, even if we choose to
quote it, we are required to then interpret it, or clarify what it means. This
is when knowing how to paraphrase comes in handy.

According to Concepcion Dadufalza (1992), “A paraphrase is essentially

a retatement that renders more transparent the full meaning of a piece of
discourse. …, it is a kind of translation from one register of language to
another, such as from scientific discourse to ordinary lay man’s terms;
from literary or poetic style to common discourse; from archaic writing to
present usage; or from slang to standard English. For a college student…,
a paraphrase is an indication that he comprehends the meaning of his
references and is able to incorporate in his writing those views, ideas, or
just plain information which he has gathered from various sources in
language that is his own.”

A paraphrase is a “full rewrite of the original” (Dadufalza). It could be

longer or shorter than the original, depending on your word choice and
choice of sentence patterns. But it does not include information that is not
in the original.

Consider the example below.

Passage D: From Canon Law on Marriage: Introductory Notes and Comments by

Alfredo Dacanay, SJ

The exercise of discretion of judgement is intelligence brought to bear on a

particular choice to be made, and that this basis of nullity has to do with the
harmonious integration of the intellect and will from which proceeds a conscious
and free determination directed towards a certain object. Marital consent then
derives from a combined action of cognitive, deliberative/critical, and volitional
faculties. One must know what is at stake; one must be capable of considering
and evaluating the elements, properties, rights, and obligations of marriage as
well as one’s own capacity to fulfill those obligations; and one must be free to
want and choose this way of life with or that particular person.

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 Unit I Module 2 23

For a valid act of consent, one must therefore have a rudimentary knowledge of
marriage and must freely accept its responsibilities, and, in addition he/she must
have the judgemental capacity to evaluate what is being consented to, to elicit the
act of consent and to fulfill what is involved or demanded by marriage. One must
be able, in a sense, to “look to the future”—to see and assess the danger signals
which are obvious to family and friends and which are being commented on by
them.

Such a critical faculty is generally of later development in people and is not usually
attributed to persons until their late teens of early twenties at the earliest. There
are many in whom it is of much later development, and some, indeed in whom it
never develops at all. It is a special kind of faculty proportionate to the special type
of heterosexual relationship that marriage is. One might conceivably be a good
judge in business or be a highly competent researcher, and still be grossly lacking
in the required kind of judgement for choosing a partner and entering the married
state with that partner. In other words, competence in one’s profession is not a
necessary index of maturity in this area.

Paraphrase:
Consent in marriage is measured by a person’s ability to understand what
marriage means and requires of him/her, his/her ability to freely agree to entering
this state of life, and his/her ability to fulfill marital obligations. A person is not born
with this ability to assess or evaluate his/her fitness for marriage. It is an ability
that is usually developed in young adulthood. Some people develop it later in life,
and others not at all. It is an ability moreover that is not guaranteed by signs of
good judgement in other areas of one’s life, such as in one’s career or profession.
An individual with a good business sense is not necessarily able to evaluate his/
her fitness for marriage and therefore give valid consent to being married.

Here’s another example:

Passage E: From “Building a New Paradigm: Gender, Health, and Development”

It has long been customary to define differences between women and men by
reducing them to nature or bodily functions, which are supposed to be essentially
the same worldwide. Until now, science has legitimized the idea that men and
women are fundamentally different because of their hormones, brains, natures
or innermost psyches. Recent research, however, has shown that there is often
far more variation in bodily and psychic structure and/or function within groups of
women and within groups of men than between those groups. Furthermore, the
validity of the use of sex as opposed to gender (like nature as opposed to culture
and disease as opposed to illness) is under scrutiny. The question at issue here
is to what extent we may consider bodily functions and human behavior which
were traditionally conceptualized as attributes of sex (that is, nature) as
technological, cultural and social constructs. There is, for instance, enough
evidence now that apparently natural functions such as sexual behavior,
childbearing, and mothering are culturally and socially defined activities. But to
what extent can we say the same about, for instance, hormonal functions and the
wiring of the brains?

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24 Communication II

Paraphrase:
It is widely accepted that the difference between men and women is fundamentally
a matter of biological make-up. But there is new evidence to suggest that women
are not necessarily the same physiologically the world over and neither are men.
The physiological differences between groups of women and between groups of
men can be greater or more significant than those between men and women of
the same racial stock. Also, what used to be thought of as biological, and therefore
universal, categories, such as sexual behavior and childbearing, appear to be
culturally and socially determined. Is this also the case with hormones and the
way the mind works?

Activity 2-2
Now try and paraphrase this:

Passage D: From “Issues Confronting Mass Vaccination: The Experience

with Hepatitis B Immunization” by Ernesto O. Domingo

Hepatitis B (HB) is caused by a virus that attaches the liver primarily. Though
rarely fatal, the infection can persist in a chronic form. Chronic hepatitis B
(CHB) can lead to cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer, which are fatal and for
which there is no satisfactory treatment. The chronicity of HB infection is
determined by a number of factors but age of acquisition is the most important.
When acquired during the perinatal period, infection leads to chronicity in
more than 90 percent of cases; infection that occurs beyond the age of 16
years has only 2-10 percent incidence in the chronic form.

HB infection is a major global health problem. The WHO estimates that more
than half of the world’s population has been infected by this virus. Fifty million
new infections occur every year, resulting in 350 million cases of CHB. Seventy-
five percent (262.5 million) of CHB victims reside in the Asia-Pacific region.
One to one and a half million CHB victims die from cirrhosis and liver cancer
every year. They are the source of new infections. In the Philippines, the rural
poor acquire the infection very early, that is before the age of 5 years. On the
average, the prevalence of past infection in the population is about 58 percent.
Ten percent of all Filipinos have CHB. No wonder primary liver cancer (PLC)
ranks second and seventh of all total cancers in males and females,
respectively. Twenty-five out of 100,000 adult females develop and die of PLC
every year.

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 Unit I Module 2 25

Comment on Activity 2-2

My paraphrase is as follows:

Caused by a virus attacking the liver, hepatitis B (HB) is not deadly, but it can
persist and in this way cause cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer. HB afflicts
more than two billion people worldwide, or more than half of the world’s
population. Fifty million people get infected every year. About a million of the
350 million CHB patients die from cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer
annually. Three quarters of CHB victims or 262.5 million live in the Asia Pacific
region. In the Philippines, a tenth of the population (about 10 million) have
CHB, and primary liver cancer is the second and seventh most deadly cancer
for males and females, respectively.

Don’t worry if your paraphrase is not identical to mine. That would

be quite unlikely, wouldn’t it, unless you have some abilities in
mental telepathy! It’s enough to say at this point that a paraphrase
tries to account for all of the key points in the original text without
copying the phrasing of the original. You can also re-arrange the
key points to clarify meaning. Simply guard against distorting the
meaning of the original.

Quoting
At the risk of being accused of being too elementary, let me ask the question:
What is a quote?

A quote is a word-for-word copy of a text, of course.

When does one quote?

In general, a quote is best for:

l Short passages
l When the quoted material is the most succinct formulation of the topic
and to paraphrase it would be to risk mangling the meaning or blunting
the point
l To prove a point; to enlist expert scholarly support

UP Open University
26 Communication II

Consider the following passages which include quoted material:

Passage G: From “Dealing with the MILF and the Abu Sayyaf: Who’s Afraid of An
Islamic State?” by Nathan Gilbert Quimpo

However, the development projects, though well-intentioned, fall short of what the
MILF wants. “Everyone thinks that if you address the problem of
underdevelopment,” says Murad, “everything will get well. But we think the problem
of underdevelopment is just the fruit of a deeper problem. The problem is that we
do not fit into the [Philippine] system. Our culture, traditional, religious values are
not in consonance with the system. We do not feel we are part of it. We’ve always
been outside it. That’s why we did not develop.…”

Passage H: From “Corruption: A Framework” by Emmanuel S. De Dios

Shleifer and Vishny (1993) have defined corruption simply as “the sale by
government officials of government property for personal gain.”

In the paragraph from Quimpo, the quote proves the claim made in the
topic sentence much more effectively than any explanation by the author.
The quote gets it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. (Of course,
Murad is introduced earlier in the article from which this passage is taken
as a ranking leader of the MILF, so we can take it that’s he’s the horse
from whom we should take it.)

The quote used in the paragraph from de Dios illustrates what we mean
by some statements being worthy of being quoted because they are succinct
formulations of the idea you want to convey.

Some quoted passages are not short—in fact, they can be a paragraph or
even two paragraphs long. But you feel that the passage you’re quoting
bolsters a point you are making and it is best for your reader to see this for
themselves. In that case, go ahead. But do try not to quote several pages
of a source. Try to quote only a paragraph at most, and if longer than this,
abridge the quoted material with the use of ellipsis. An example is my
quote of Dadufalza earlier in this module where I omit certain words
from the original, since I feel they are not necessary, and use ellipsis (…)
to mark the omission. But be sure that you’re not altering the meaning of
the original in the omission!

Also, do not just plop a quote down on a page. When you quote, you
must explain or at least make obvious to the reader why you are doing so.
A quote without an explanation is called a dropped quote.

UP Open University
 Unit I Module 2 27

Guzman (2000) illustrates some stylistic conventions used when recording

quotes (Box 2-1).

Box 2-1. Conventions for quoting (from Guzman, 2000)

1. Full quotation of a short passage:

“The sound of a burning forest is an eerie one. It is like the sound of

an exceedingly hungry man munching on crackers.”

2. Full quotation interrupted by an explanatory passage:

‘The sound of a burning forest,” recalls Manuel L. Quezon III in

“Palawan Burning,” is an eerie one. It is like the sound of an exceed-
ingly hungry man munching on crackers.’

‘The sound of a burning forest is an eerie one,” recalls Manuel L.

Quezon III in his essay, “Palawan Burning.” He continues som-
berly, “It is like the sound of an exceedingly hungry man munching
on crackers.”’

3. Full quotation of a longer passage (usually four or more lines):

The sound of a burning forest is an eerie one. It is like the

sound of an exceedingly hungry man munching crackers.
Munch, munch, munch; an occasional snap; but on the whole
a methodical, hungry sound, the sound of greedy fires
devouring living things.

(The passage is indented or set off from the stem sentence and the
rest of the text, and is not enclosed in quotation marks. It is some-
times recorded using a smaller font size.)

4. Partial quotation:

Manuel L. Quezon III in his essay, “Palawan Burning” compares the

sound of a burning forest to that of “an exceedingly hungry man
munching crackers.”

5. Quotation with ellipsis:

“The sound of a burning forest is . . . like the sound of an exceedingly

hungry man munching crackers.”

The sound of a burning forest is . . . like the sound of an exceedingly

hungry man munching crackers . . . ; an occasional snap; but on the
whole a methodical, hungry sound, the sound of greedy fires devouring
living things.

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28 Communication II

“Munch, munch, munch; an occasional snap; but on the whole a

methodical, hungry sound . . . . (The fourth period marks the end of
the sentence.)

Life, while it has a chance, truly never gives up. Here was the stump
of what must have been an impressive tree, the sad remainder of
decades of growth, the remainder of a holocaust to progress. [Italics
mine.] And here, from this stump, was a sign of life, a tree that was
not dead. A tree that had survived.
...
Because of this experience, I have decided to avoid the consumption
of food cooked with charcoal. It is not right that in order to grill a fish,
or a steak, a forest should be the price.

(The ellipsis here takes the place of a paragraph/s deleted.

Sometimes, asterisks are used instead of periods.)

6. Quotation with interpolation/s:

6.1 An explanation or clarification:

“We [the author’s mountaineer friend and himself] came across trails
obviously made by man: young shrubs and trees boloed into
submission, the cadavers of massacred trees.”

6.2 An error or mistake in the passage, as quoted:

“And while I was with a fiend [sic] who was a mountaineer, and
therefore used to navigating forests, I am afraid that I made our
progress toward the fire slow and exceedingly clumsy going.”
(Obviously a typographical error for “friend,” “fiend” is immediately
followed by [sic], which is Latin for “so”; i.e., it was so — or that is
how it appeared — in the original.)

6.3 Emphasis or underscoring provided by the person quoting

the passage: (Note the difference in the use of parentheses and
brackets.)

“There were scorched tree trunks and the carbonized remains of

felled logs, which crumbled to ashes when you touched them. This
was obviously man’s work.” (Italics mine.)

Life, while it has a chance, truly never gives up. Here was the stump
of what must have been an impressive tree, the sad remainder of
decades of growth, the remainder of a holocaust to progress. [Italics
mine.] And here, from this stump, was a sign of life, a tree that was
not dead. A tree that had survived.

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 Unit I Module 2 29

6.4 Clarification (by substitution), plus emphasis or underscoring

provided:

[The noise a man from the city makes as he stumbles through the woods]
assaults the ears, echoes among the threes, reverberates in your head,
reminding you with every step that you make that your are an intruder, an
invader.” (Underscoring/Underlining mine.)

7. Quotation that runs across two pages:

“You can only see these funeral pyres or nature from the air, and on the
ground from Puerto Princesa proper./One has to drive three to four hours
to actually reach the fires. (The “/” marks the end of the first page and
the start of the next.)

I know, I know. Guzman doesn’t explain. But there’s really no need, is

there? You simply observe the conventions for, say, using the ellipsis or
interrupting a quotation with an explanatory passage. I will only add
here an explanation for quoting a long passage, which is that you set it off
from your paragraph as a separate paragraph, indent it, and drop the
quotation marks. The fact that it’s set off and indented from your regular
text tells your reader it’s a quote.

You might want to consult Ventura’s On Your Own: Doing Research Without
Plagiarizing (1999) for examples with explanations.

A Note About Notecards

A notecard is just what the word suggests: a card on which you write
your notes from a source. Many writing teachers agree that 4” x 6” or 5”
x 8” index cards are best.

The notecard contains:

1. the name of the author of the source or a shortened title of the source
(on the upper lefthand corner)
2. the page number in the source where the information noted in the
card is found (noted under the name of the source)
3. a short descriptive title for the information (something you provide
yourself) noted in the card (on the upper righthand corner)
4. your notes, which could be a direct quote, a paraphrase, or a summary
(in the middle section of the card)
5. your comments on the information noted (under your notes)

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30 Communication II

But why notecards, you ask. Can’t you use a plain old notebook, or scratch
paper? Well, yes you can. But notecards are easier to arrange and re-
arrange for when you’re about to write your article or report. With
notecards, you won’t have to flip through the pages of your notebook to
look for a piece of information you recall noting down but now can’t
seem to find.

Recap
In this module, we discussed various ways of noting or recording
information from sources. These are summarizing, paraphrasing, and
making a direct quote.

You summarize when you want to include only the main points of the
source text. In summarizing, as in paraphrasing, you use your own words.

You note down information in the form of a paraphrase if the detail it

contains is important and you wish to clarify what the source passage
means.

You make a direct quote when the quoted material is the most succinct
formulation of the topic or idea, and when the quoted material proves a
point you’re making. But a quote should be accompanied by an
explanation. And it is best to keep direct quotes to a minimum.

The type of note-taking you will be making the most use of is summarizing.

As for notecards, well though it may seem fussy to some and so lacking in
spontaneity (!), in the end they do make for an orderly way of keeping
notes.

UP Open University
 Module 3
Writing the Report

N ow that you have noted down all the

information you will need for your
report, what’s next?
Objectives
After studying this module,
you should be able to:
Reported Speech:
1. Organize information in
A Basic Feature a report;
of Academic Writing 2. Avoid the pitfalls of
incoherence; and
In the preceding module, you were taught 3. Document your report.
how to note down information from your
sources in your own words. You were
taught how to make new texts out of source texts.

The point of all that is not so you can now claim the information you got
from your sources as your own. I have to stress this point because many
people have the mistaken notion that it is only direct quotes whose sources
should be explicitly identified. They think that having paraphrased
somebody’s ideas, they can now forget about telling the reader where
they got their ideas from.

This is called plagiarism, folks. And contrary to another mistaken notion

that you can get away with it (or that the reader will not be the wiser to it)
because after all you have phrased it in your own words, the dishonesty is
so easy to spot. How? Well, it is so obvious that the information could not
32 Communication II

be something you thought of yourself! Can you really claim that the
information that Gregoria de Jesus was married at 18 came off the top of
your head? Or that the idea that the tendency toward depression is often
genetic is something you thought of yourself? Or that you just know,
instinctively, that liver cancer is the second most fatal cancer among men?

So now you know how to spot a false claim of being in the know, as
evidenced by unacknowledged sources. You just ask the writer: How do
you know? Is it plausible for the writer to have come upon this bit of
information all by him/herself?

The fact is that there is no need to pretend that you know more than you
do. There is no need to hide the fact that your report is 90 percent facts
and opinions taken from other texts and authors. In academe, it is all
right—even preferred—that one have many intellectual debts. According
to Giltrow, “A main characteristic of the genres of professional scholarship
is the way one piece of writing openly, explicitly demonstrates its
dependence on other pieces of writing. In fact, unless scholars enjoy
international renown—unless their names are virtually household words
in academic circles—they can scarcely publish a sentence without locating
that sentence amongst what other people have written on the topic. The
scholar’s position is defined in relation to other scholars, rather than a
position of standalone wisdom.”

Your scholarly dependence on other scholars is shown in two ways. One

of these is the use of footnotes, in-text citations of the source, and reference
lists at the end of your article or report. We will discuss the conventions of
this way of acknowledging sources towards the end of this module.
Another way of showing your dependence on other scholars is the use of
words and phrases in the body of your article or report that show that
what you are writing about belongs not to you but to someone else. The
term for such words and phrases, says Ventura (1999), is
“acknowledgement phrase.”

The acknowledgement phrase, which marks what Giltrow (1999) calls

“reported speech,” contains the name of the author and/or the title of
source and a reporting verb, or a verb that tells what the source is doing.
Some of these verbs are:

implies argues demonstrates

says claims shows
states posits illustrates
notes postulates indicates
suggests hypothesizes identifies
points out affirms reports

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 Unit I Module 3 33

Can you add some more to this list? Note that some of these are neutral or
value-free, while others are evaluative—that is, the verb suggests an
attitude to the source, an interpretation of what the source is doing vis-à-
vis an idea.

The use of these marks or signals of reported speech do mean a great deal,
as the following examples will show:

1. Reidenberg claims that life in cyberspace, like other forms of life, is regulated.
2. Life in cyberspace, like other forms of life, is regulated.

1. Vergara argues that contrary to the idea that photographs are truthful records
of reality, photographers and photography can and do distort reality.
2. Contrary to the idea that photographs are truthful records of reality,
photographers and photography can and do distort reality.

The first sentence in each pair contains signals that call attention to its
being reported speech, or speech belonging to someone other than the
person who wrote the sentence. The second sentence in each pair implies
that the sentence is the writer’s own, which of course is a misrepresentation.

According to Giltrow, the signals of reported speech serve as a “frame”

for material you summarized from your source. She cites the following
functions of the frame:

1. It “introduces your sources openly and directly.”

2. It “establishes the boundary between different sources of information,
showing that you are moving from one source to another.”
3. It “establishes the boundary between material you have collected from
other sources and your own commentary on or evaluation of this
material.”

Beginning Your Report:

Introducing Your Source
Giltrow recommends that you begin your report with a straightforward
introduction of the source of the information you wish to report. That is,
begin by stating the author and title of your source, and then provide a
general description of what the source does or is about. For example:

Passage I: From Making Connections: A Group Therapy Program for Filipino

Autistic Children and Their Families by Ma. Lourdes A. Carandang

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34 Communication II

In 1943 Dr. Leo Kanner published a now classic paper entitled “Autistic
Disturbances of Affective Contact” where he described a paradoxical and
bewildering behavioral disturbance of childhood. Based on his clinical
observation of a unique group of young patients who displayed an extreme
detachment from all human relationships, he recognized this autism (literally
self-ism”), or total self-centeredness, as the fundamental pathogenic disorder
in their illness.

Passage J: Adapted from Literature-Based Reading Programs by Lina Diaz

de Rivera

Bruno Bettelheim published a book called The Uses of Enchantment: The

Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976). In it, he makes two very
important points. The first is that folktales and fairy tales, including myths and
legends, were not written with children in mind. They emerged in the respective
lore of many races as a means of explaining certain perplexing phenomena.
That children take a fancy to them is not surprising. They are fast-moving,
interesting tales. To re-write them would be to betray the heritage of the race.

Passage K: From “A Study of Gender and Power Constructs in Folk Healing

and Sorcery” by Carolyn Sobritchea

Pertierra’s article on Visayan witchcraft (1983) provides an interesting analysis

of how femaleness is constituted in the asuang (witch). He asserts that
although asuang are always women, their “most virulent representation” is that
of a beautiful woman. The female asuang has the power to lure unsuspecting
men to their deaths, cause miscarriages by sucking out foetal fluids or inflicting
pain on humans with or without provocation.

Asuang are unselective of their victims; they are perceived to be malicious,

vindictive, whimsical and anti-social. Pertierra implies that these traits are often
associated with women because of their being house-bound and oriented to
the domestic sphere. He sees the feminization of the asuang-complex as as
“common response to fundamental threats to the conceptual and moral orders
in many Philippine communities.” By intensifying public fear of the feminine
asuang, society reaffirms the values necessary to reproduce the public
(masculine) domain—the values of reciprocity and exchange. He says…

Indeed, there is no need for elaborate introductions in a report. It is best to

just plunge right in, so to speak. A “This report is about …..” will do
nicely, or some variation of this.

Really, you say incredulously.

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 Unit I Module 3 35

Well, perhaps you would prefer a less blunt opening. Say the report is
about the incidence of poverty (remember this from Module 1?). You could
start by saying,

Who among us isn’t familiar with the face of poverty? Everywhere we look in
this city we come face-to-face with signs of poverty. So when asked the
question about the extent of poverty in the Philippines today, one could very
easily say, “Oh, poverty in the Philippines is widespread.” How widespread
exactly, is the subject of my report. More precisely, my report will provide
statistics on the incidence of poverty across three administrations—that of Cory
Aquino, Fidel Ramos, and Joseph Estrada.

Or if it’s a report on clinical depression, you could start with:

The word “depression” is so commonplace it hardly sounds like a medical

condition. But my report today will show that it is so.

What do these sample introductions have in common? If you thought,

well they’re all short, you’d be right. My advice is: Don’t get hung up on
long introductions. Be direct to the point. Cut to the chase. Get on with it!

But seriously now, Giltrow’s advice about beginning with an

acknowledgement of your source is one you must take to heart. Or to use
another figure of speech, introducing your source is a habit you must
cultivate.

With a report that derives information from various sources, you can begin
with a general acknowledgement of your sources. For example, the
introductory paragraph for the report on poverty incidence above could
actually go on like this:

These statistics are taken from NEDA reports published in the Philippine Statistical
Yearbook, reports of the Ibon Data Bank, and reports by the Philippine Human
Development Network. You will see as we go along that there is some disagreement
between these sets of statistics. The report includes an explanation of these
discrepancies, chiefly the fact that there are no universal measures of poverty.

But if you think that since you’ve introduced your sources at the beginning
of your report, you can forget about mentioning them henceforth, think
again. According to Giltrow, “The further your readers get from that
introducing statement, the less certain they will be about the source of
information.” Consider this re-writing of the passage from Sobritchea:

Pertierra’s article on Visayan witchcraft (1983) provides an interesting analysis

of how femaleness is constituted in the asuang (witch). He asserts that
although asuang are always women, their “most virulent representation” is that
of a beautiful woman. The female asuang has the power to lure unsuspecting
men to their deaths, cause miscarriages by sucking out foetal fluids or inflicting
pain on humans with or without provocation.

UP Open University
36 Communication II

Asuang are unselective of their victims; they are perceived to be malicious,

vindictive, whimsical and anti-social. These traits are often associated with
women because of their being house-bound and oriented to the domestic
sphere. The feminization of the asuang-complex is a “common response to
fundamental threats to the conceptual and moral orders in many Philippine
communities.” By intensifying public fear of the feminine asuang, society
reaffirms the values necessary to reproduce the public (masculine) domain—
the values of reciprocity and exchange.

The lack of references to Pertierra in the second paragraph makes the reader
unsure about who the source of the observations is. Is it Sobritchea saying
these, or is it still Pertierra? Or is it another source, one not yet named?

Organizing Your Report: Coming Up

With a Strong Topic
Rafael: Why talk about organizing, especially since we all know that the basic
format of any essay, whether it’s a report or something else, is: introduction,
followed by the body, followed by the conclusion. Right?

Anna: Well, not really.

Rafael: Oh, I know. You want me to list what will go into the body. You want an
outline. So here’s mine:

Literacy in Pre-colonial Philippines

I. Introduction
II. The alibata
III. Literacy in the Muslim kingdoms
A. Scholarly accounts
B. Letters by datus and kings
IV. Literacy among the Mangyan
A. The Mangyan postal system
B. Mangyan poetry
V. Conclusion

Anna: Ok, sounds good. But what’s your introduction exactly? And then how will
you go from one topic in your outline to the next? And finally, what’s your conclusion
exactly?

Rafael: Well, I will begin by saying that contrary to what a lot of people think, and
what our colonial history suggests, our ancestors were literate. They, or at least
some of them, knew how to write and they had a literary tradition to speak of. I will
then proceed to cite evidence of this claim, beginning with the alibata and so on
down to Mangyan poetry. Then in my conclusion I will simply reiterate the idea that
I began with.

Anna: Hmmm. How do you go from letters of Muslim datus and kings to literacy
among the Mangyan? And how do you go from the Mangyan postal system to
Mangyan poetry? And so what if our ancestors were literate? That’s all water
under the bridge now, isn’t it?

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 Unit I Module 3 37

Ok, what am I driving at now? What’s the point of the dialogue between
Anna and Rafael? Well, I simply want to call attention to the fact that a
report should be more than a list or a narration of facts, or bits of
information. There ought to be some way of organizing the information
you have gathered into a whole that makes sense, that has a meaning.
Moreover, that meaning should be an interesting one, a powerful one,
one that will grip the imagination of your readers so that they don’t end
up simply forgetting what you wrote, or thinking that your report was
just a record of trivia.

Giltrow says you need to have a strong topic. No, this is not topic in the
usual sense, as in the general subject matter that you’re reporting about.
It’s more like the answer to the question “What is this all about?” or,
better, “What is the point of all this?” In a sense, what we’re referring to
here is what other writing scholars call a thesis. The term refers to the key
idea of an essay or article. And yes, even reports—that is, those reports
that are more than just a simple answer to a question posed by your
professor in, say, an exam or class discussion—must have a thesis. To put
that last sentence more clearly, a well-written report or documented essay
must have a thesis; it must make a meaningful point out of the mass of
information it presents.

A thesis for Rafael report could be revealed by certain combinations of the

bits of information he gathered. The data might reveal something about
the circumstances under which a literate tradition thrives and doesn’t
thrive. Or a thesis statement may be made out of certain similarities as
well as significant differences in the uses of literacy in the communities
and/or traditions included in Rafael report.

The foregoing suggests that you first formulate your thesis from a serious
reflection on the information you have gathered for your report, and then
you organize the information you have gathered in a way that will support
your thesis and make it clear to your readers. Consider this boxed example
of a report (actually only a small section with a 400 page book):

The Rise of Literacy

The art of writing was introduced into the archipelago, from South India by way of
Sumatra, circa 1000-1200 A.D., contemporaneously with other aspects of Indian
culture. The system of writing was syllabic rather than alphabetic, and the direction
of writing was from bottom to top, left to right.42 For implements, the ancient
Filipinos used crude materials: an iron stylus or knife, bamboo, palm leaves, tree
bark, and similar materials. While various Philippine scripts have been discovered,
their close affinities speak of a significant unity in this culture area.43 As to the
diffusion of these scripts in the archipelago, Robert Fox says:

Syllabic writing (a key to cultural growth) was confined to some seventeen

Filipino groups, all being coastal or near-coastal peoples. Writing,

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38 Communication II

in contrast, appears to have been absent in the mountains of northern

Luzon and eastern Mindanao, precisely those areas which were relatively
isolated from the proto-historic influences of the outer world.44

In the 15th century, another system of writing, the Arabic, was to intrude into this
older, Indian-derived system, particularly in Mindanao and Sulu, replacing what
local scripts were in the areas.45 This process was to be repeated in a wider,
more consequential manner with the coming of another vigorous cultural
complexthe Spanish.

The existence of a system of writing in the islands impressed the early Spanish
chroniclers and missionaries. Writing in 1600, Chiniro says:

So accustomed are all these islanders to writing and reading that there
is scarcely a man, and much less a woman, who cannot read and write
in letters proper to the island of Manila... They wrote on bamboos or on
palm leaves, using an iron point for a pen...46

Morga, who was in the Philippines in 1595-1603, makes a similar observation:

Throughout the islands the natives write very well, using certain characters,
almost like Greek or Arabic, fifteen in number, three of them being vowels
equivalent of our five. The consonants are twelve. All are used with certain
dots and commas, and in combination they express what they with to
write with all the fluency and ease of our Spanish alphabet...47

Thus, when the Spaniards came, the system of writing was already in an early
stage of development although there was no large body of literature written in
these ancient scripts. Such fact explains the relative facility with which the old
culture was replaced with the new.

Writing in pre-Spanish times was put to limited uses. Chirino observed that these
scripts were not used for purposes of religion, governmnet and public order “for
as we have said they never used these except to correspond with one another.”48
Writing in 1843, Sinibaldo de Mas also said: “... no books nor any kind of literature
in this character (alphabets) may be met with, except for a fewamatory verses
written in a highly hyperbolic style, and hardly intelligible.”49

Corroborative data are given by Harold Conklin in a study of ancient scripts still in
use among the Mangyan of Southern Mindoro and, to a lesser extent, the
Tagbanuwa of Palawan.50 Conklin notes that the writing was never used to record
mythological or historical topics. The script is used to write messages (love
letters, requests, etc.) andto record the brief ambahan andurukai chants.51 It is
also used in ritual, i.e., the lambay it init bau uran, “the ritual for inducing the sun
to shine and for the rain to fall” during the harvest and planting seasons. In this
ritual, the priest reads from a bamboo strip the names of the gods invoked in the
performance of the ritual.

A number of conclusions therefore can be made concerning the writing culture

before the coming of the Spaniards. The native system of writing was in an early
stage of development and was still in the process of being developed and diffused.
The Arabic system that had come to supersede it, particularly in Mindanao and
Sulu, was itself still in the stage of being introduced.

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 Unit I Module 3 39

Pre-Spanish writing must have been restricted due to a number of factors: the
system was stil on its way towards greater sophistication and flexibility, finer
materials for writing were still to be found or produced; and, more important, this
particular culture tool still had to gain prominence in a tradition largely oral.52
These factors had the following results: relatively short texts (messages, lists,
brief incantatory phrases, etc.) were inscribed; certain kinds of texts by virtue of
their strongly traditional and “religious” nature may not have lent themselves
easily to an alien form of transmission; and that this tool was available not only to
just a few groups in the islands but to a community of sharers definitely more
constricted than that which sustained oral art.53

Such is the sway of tradition that even after the spread of literacy the oral spell
remained. In avery real way after the medium is one with the message. Gaspar
de San Agustin, in 1720, says:”...what has been preached to them and printed in
books avails but little, for the word of any old man regarded as a sage has more
weight with them than the word of the whole world.”54

It must be remembered that a literary culture based on writing presupposes not

just the mere existence of writing but an established tradition of education based
upon letters. On this basis one can conclude that a true culture of literacy was not
present in the archipelago before the coming of the Spaniards.

Such a culture was to slowly evolve. Even while the art of writing came to be more
widely practised, it is possible that much of literature remained in a “pseudo-oral”
tradition, i.e., that written texts came to be the cribs or basis for memorization and
oral recitation.55 Such a “pseudo-oral” existence has important repercussions
both for oral and written literature in points of theme, structure, and style. During
the Spanish period, and even beyond, much literature existed in this border area
where values from both realms were combined.56

Chirino may have overgeneralized when he said in 1600: “Now they write not only
their own letters, but ours as well, with a very well cut pen and on paper like
ourselves. They have learned our language and pronunciation and write it as well
as we do, and even better, because they are so clever that they learn anything very
quickly.”57

The more marked change from native to Roman script must have taken place at
the close of the 17th century. In the 18th century, the old syllabary fell into such
disuse that Fr. Sebastian Totanes wrote: “it is now rare to find a native who knows
how to read his own letters and rarer still one who knows how to write them.”58

Earlier, in 1663, Colin said that owing to the difficulties of the native script “those
who know our characters are studying how to wrie their own language in these. All
of them have now adopted our way of writing.”59 But one presumes that the process
of replacement was not in any way simple or swift In. the 17th century, and beyond,
in the less acculturated areas, native and Spanish systems of writing co-existed.
Colin himself remarked:

They all cling fondly to their own method of writing and reading. There is
scarcely a man, and still less a woman, who does not know and practice
that method, even those who are already Christians in matters of devotion.
For from the sermons which they hear, and the histories and lives of the
saints, and the prayers and poems on divine matters, composed by
themselves (they have also some perfect poets in their own manner,

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40 Communication II

who translate elegantly into their own language any Spanish comedy),
they use small books and prayer books in their language, and
manuscripts which are in great number...60

In the transition from the native syllabary to the new system there may have been
the phenomenon Bienvenido Lumbera calls the “loss of literacy.” Speaking of the
Tagalogs, Lumbera says: “What seemed to have happened was that literature
Tagalogs became fewer between the coming ofthe Spaniards in 1570 and the
middle of the eighteenth century.”61 Lumbera sees in this break ther eason for the
loss of precontact literature, for the older members of the community had records
the young could no longer read as the latter were already learning a new alphabet.
This theory though is open to question: there is the paucity of precontact literature
to begin with; furthermore, th coexistence of the two systems over a period of
transition may be as real a fact as the sudden cooptation of one by the other.

There is nevertheless reason to believe that there was no orderly transfer or

substitution of skills owing to the stresses of conquest and the particularistic
character of native society. The first century of colonization must have been marked
by much disorientation in demographic, economic and cultural patterns. In such
a situation culture change manifested itself in many ways: the loss of skills and
values as they fell into disuse, their continued existence side by side with new
cultural forms, and, in many cases, their eventual substitution by these forms.62

What impresses is the fact that culture change is complex for it allows for the
simultaneous existence of elements from “old” and “new” traditions or the
combination and fusion of elements from these traditions. “Replacement” is
never total. This is true not just of the matter of literacy but of literature in general.

According to Giltrow, the strong topic—what other writers call a thesis—

has the following uses:

1. “It gives the writer important things to say in her introduction,”

preparing the reader for what follows.
2. “It can be reinstated at frequent intervals, showing the reader what to
concentrate on and how to fit the parts together.”
3. “It can guide the writer in the use of her research results, directing
her” to what data she should emphasize and what combinations of
data will be more meaningful.

We’ve discussed the first and third point. Now let’s see how the second
point works.

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 Unit I Module 3 41

Making Connections: Coherence in a Report

Consider the following passage:

Passage L: From Rafael Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution

One method—which has many variations—of obtaining anting-anting was to

exhume the body of an unchristened child, or an aborted fetus, placing this
inside a bamboo tube pierced at the bottom. The liquid that slowly oozed out
was collected in a bottle and saved for Holy Week, during which time it was
sipped by an aspirant until Good Friday. Initiation rites were held on Holy
Saturday or Easter Sunday to test the anting-anting powers of the individual.40 A
different way of obtaining anting-anting, this time in the form of an object, was to
go to the cemetery on midnight of Holy Wednesday or Thursday and place
bowls of food, a glass of wine and two lighted candles on a tomb. Before the
candles burned out, the food and drink would have been consumed by spirits
who would leave a white stone in one of the empty vessels. A struggle for
possession of this anting-anting would then ensue between the aspirant and
the earth-spirit called lamang lupa.41 Only extraordinarily brave or daring men
used this method; there were the ones, it is said, who usually became rebel or
bandit chiefs. The more common, and less risky, way of obtaining anting-anting
was simply to get hold of objects used in or associated with Holy Week rituals.
The immense Lenten candle called cirio pascual, the candles used in the
ceremony of total darkness (particularly the last one to be extinguished), the
monstrance, the communion table, and even the bell that rang at 3:00 p.m. on
Good Friday, were broken into fragments to serve as anting-anting.42

This is a relatively short passage, but Ileto, the author, takes great pains to
remind us of his topic at strategic points. Can you highlight those
reminders of his topic?

If you highlighted “One method—which has many variations—of

obtaining anting-anting” and “A different way of obtaining anting-anting”
and “The more common, and less risky, way of obtaining anting-anting”,
you’re perfectly correct. These reminders of the topic, or “reinstatement”
and “reactivation” of the topic as Giltrow calls them, serve to ensure
coherence in your text. They also ensure that your readers don’t lose their
bearings, as can happen when you are being quite detailed.

More precisely, these restatements of topic, according to Giltrow:

1. construct a higher level of generality by giving a general and, in this

case, abstract name to the details of the passages;
2. establish the meaning of the objects and conditions referred to; and
3. guide the reader’s interpretation of the facts mentioned.

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42 Communication II

Activity 3-1
At this point, you should be ready to make your own report with
information from the sources listed in your annotated bibliography
(Activity 1-1). Specifically, write a 3-page report with a strong thesis
using information you gathered from at least three of the eight
sources in your annotated working bibliography. Summarize,
paraphrase, quote information as necessary and observe coherence
in your report.

Documenting Your Report

Source notes
In the passage from Ileto quoted above, you will notice the presence of
certain numbers in superscript format. These are numbers indicating
notations of the source of the information cited. Some source notes appear
at the bottom of the page where they are referred to, and are thus called
footnotes. Other source notes appear at the end of the whole chapter or
article, and are thus called endnotes.

Footnotes and endnotes are the “traditional” way of documenting sources.

An alternative way of documenting sources is the in-text citation, whereby
the author’s surname and the year of publication of the source is indicated
in parentheses next to the information taken from the source. For example,

The science curriculum in Philippine high schools is lacking in creativity and

integration. (Yap, 1995)

In the example, we know from the in-text citation that the sentiment
expressed in the statement before the citation is not the writer’s own, but
one that the writer has paraphrased from Yap’s 1991 study. The full details
of the source, including the title of Yap’s article, Yap’s first name, and the
publisher of the article, appear in the List of Works Cited (traditionally
called a “bibliography”) that appears at the end of the entire report.

Another style of making in-text citations is to note the author’s surname

followed by the page number (instead of the year of publication) in the
source where the information cited can be found, also enclosed in
parentheses.

UP Open University
 Unit I Module 3 43

Bibliographic/reference list entries

There are generally two styles for bibliographic/reference list entries: the
humanities style and the author-date style. These differences may be seen
at a glance from the examples below (taken from the Chicago Manual of
Style 14th Edition):

Humanities Style:
Smith, John Q. Urban Turmoil: The Politics of Hope. New City: Polis
Publishing Co., 1986.
Wise, Penelope. “Money Today: Two Cents for a Dollar.” No Profit Review
2 (1987): 123-42.

Author-Date Style:
Smith, J. Q. 1986. Urban turmoil: The politics of hope. New City: Polis.
or
Smith, J. Q. 1986. Urban turmoil. New City: Polis.

Wise, P. 1987. Money today: Two cents for a dollar. No Profit Rev. 2:123-
42.
or
Wise, P. 1987. Money today. No Profit Rev. 2:123-42.
or
Wise, P. 1987. No Profit Rev. 2:123-42.

The similarities are:

1. Both styles include information on the author, the title of the work,
the date of publication, the publisher, and the place of publication.

2. Both styles note the author’s last name first, to facilitate alphabetical
listing.

The differences are:

1. In the humanities style, the author’s first name is spelled out while in
the author-date system it is not. This is not a hard-and-fast rule. The
author-date style may also spell out the first name and the humanities
style may use only the initials. But most readers prefer that you spell
out the author’s first name as well as his/her last name.

2. In the author-date style, the year of publication (date) immediately

follows the author’s name. In the humanities style, the date comes
after the name of the publisher. and after the journal volume number.

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44 Communication II

3. In the humanities style, the first letters of all the words in the title are
in caps (title case), while in the author-date style, only the first letter of
the entire title is in caps (sentence case). But journal titles are in title
case.

4. In the humanities style, the full title (including sub-titles) is included

while it may be included, shortened (only the title is included), or
omitted in the author-date style.

5. Quotation marks enclose the title in the humanities style. There are no
quotation marks in the author-date style.

6. The name of the publisher and the title of the journal may be abbreviated
in the author-date style.

The in-text citation (of source) formats also differ. In the humanities style,
the in-text citation includes author’s surname and page number, or just
the page number if the author’s name is already in the main text (or
paragraph). In the author-date style, the in-text citation includes the
author’s surname and the year of publication, or just the year of publication
if the author’s name is already in the main text (or paragraph). The page
number may be included if the text for which the source is being cited is a
direct quote.

SAQ 3-1
Find these out for yourself:

1. The author-date style is the preferred style in the social sciences

and the natural sciences. Why do you think is this so?

2. To which general style does the MLA (Modern Language

Association) Style belong? The APA (American Psychological
Association) Style? What’s the difference between the two?

Activity 3-2
Go over your draft report (from Activity 3-1) and document your
sources. Use the in-text citation format for source notes and be
sure to append a reference list. Choose one style for referencing
and be consistent.

UP Open University
 Unit II
The Critical Essay

I n Unit I you learned how to write a report containing information culled

from bibliographic sources or written texts. This is the most common
type of report in academe.

Our approach to report writing emphasized the importance of being able

to make a good summary of your bibliographic sources. You have a “good
summary” if you are able to include all of the important points (both
main and supporting) from your source/s and you are able to state or
express these main points in your own words.

Simplistically speaking, a report is a summary of what one’s sources have

to say about a topic.

Now, the report (defined in this way) is certainly valuable in itself or as a

text on its own. But arguably, in academe, the report is even more valuable
as a basic building block for other, more complex types of academic writing.
Which is why we started this course with the report. The other types of
academic writing we will take up use the report or aspects thereof,
specifically the summary, as a component.

In this unit, we focus on the critical essay. The word “essay” I trust you
do not need me to explain. As for “critical”, doubtless you also know
what this means. But allow me to articulate what we already know.

To be critical is to be analytical. The latter in turn means to break down

the whole into its parts, to look beyond the surface or the obvious into the
inner turnings or workings of something. To be analytical is to have a
questioning stance, and to be investigative, diagnostic, sensitive, as well
as logical or rational. While being critical and/or analytical doesn’t mean
being oppositional and contrary-minded (you can in fact agree
wholeheartedly with the text you are critiquing), it does mean being able
to stand back from one’s source/s and being able to assess both its merits
and demerits with respect to a particular point of evaluation.

The first module in this unit (Module 4) talks about developing a critical
stance, which is the first step in learning how to write a critical essay.
Module 5 describes and gives examples of the critical essay.
 Module 4
Developing a Critical Stance

Going beyond summarizing

Objectives
“What do you think of so-and-so’s article (or
theory or book or story)?” After working on this module,
you should be able to:
Surely you have been asked this question many
times, not just in the classroom but outside of it 1. Evaluate the kinds of
as well. If outside the classroom or in a non- evidence cited by sources,
academic setting, the question may be easy to including the sources’ use
fob off or parry. But in the classroom, especially of statements of fact,
if you are being asked to write down your opinion, convention and
answer in the form of an essay, the question is preference;
certainly not so easily ignored. 2. Apply the principles of
logical argument in
The problem is that in spite of its innocuous analyzing your sources’
appearance, the question is a difficult one. It in claims;
fact demands quite a lot of you. It assumes not 3. Assess your sources’
just that you understood what you read (that’s contribution to more
difficult enough, by itself) but also that you take general issues; and
a position or develop an attitude with respect 4. Articulate a critical
to what you read. Seen from the vantage point stance using one or a
of the noncommittal, the question is an combination of all of the
imposition. Seen from the vantage point of one above skills.
who hasn’t learned how to take a critical stance,
the question is a nightmare.
48 Communication II

Since as a student you are allowed neither the luxury of being

noncommittal (you must answer the teacher’s questions or fail) nor the
excuse of ignorance, you must learn to take on the question of what you
think about something and to do so with aplomb. You must learn, says
Giltrow, how to evaluate the claims and arguments that “you have
reconstructed in your summary.” Giltrow calls this taking a critical stance.

To take a critical stance does not mean to criticize or to condemn, says

Giltrow. Neither does it mean to praise. Nor is it a simple matter of
expressing your “personal” opinion. According to Giltrow, “After your
meticulous reconstruction of complicated reasoning [which is the type of
reasoning you will encounter in academic sources], praise or blame or
personal attitude may seem anti-climactic or clumsy.” I will go so far as to
say that to praise or condemn your source or to juxtapose against your
source’s complex argument your personal opinion is a rather simplistic,
even silly, thing to do. In university, to say what you think is not as simple
as coming out with the first thing that pops into your head. The word
“think” in the question “What do you think…?” that is asked in a university
setting is, whether we like it or not, meant in the most serious sense of the
word.

Strategies For Taking a Critical Stance

Below are some strategies for taking a critical stance with respect to texts
you are required to read and summarize.

Examining the evidence

Your source is making a claim about something. Now, what kinds of
evidence or proof is your source citing to prove or justify the claim?

What kinds of statements is your source making? Are they statements of

fact or are they mostly statements of opinion? Read the attached excerpt
(Appendix 4-1, on pp. 11-16 of this module) from Guzman (1998) to
understand the difference between statements of fact and opinion.

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Guzman’s discussion seems to suggest that statements of opinion are less

reliable than statements of fact (which, by the way, can be false; statements
of fact can be factual or not!) because they are not easily verifiable. But it
may be argued that everything, including the foregoing idea, is a matter
of opinion. That is to say, the value of statements is a matter of opinion.
And some opinions, such as those of experts, are credible because they
are based on (certain kinds of) evidence and/or “sound” reasoning. So if
your source is citing the opinions of others, consider whose opinion is
being cited and how credible it is relative to the subject matter on which
the opinion is being rendered (a dentist’s opinion of the state of the
Philippine economy is hardly credible, or at least not as credible as that of
an economist).

Consider too whether your source’s claim is more a matter of preference

than one of convention or fact or opinion. This time, read the excerpt
from Guzman (Appendix 4-2, on pp. 17-22 of this module) for the definition
of statements of preference and convention.

Now in answering the foregoing questions about the kind of evidence

your source cites, you do not need to be “aggressively negative” (Giltrow).
It is enough to state the type of evidence or proof or basis you find—or
don’t find. That is being critical enough.

Looking at connections
Is your source making a logical or rational argument? Or are there gaps in
the reasoning? Are there weak connections in your source’s exposition?
For a detailed discussion of weaknesses in argument that must be avoided,
read the excerpt from Guzman in Appendix 4-3 (pp. 23-31 of this module).

Again, following Giltrow’s advice, you simply have to point out these
weaknesses. In the case, of minor weaknesses, you can even take a
supportive stance and fill in the gap yourself, showing that you appreciate
your source’s effort to put forward a credible claim. For example, you
could write, “Although in this article Reyes does not unequivocally
establish the connection between violence against women and
pornography, many other studies (cf. Kintanar, 1987; Diaz, 1979; Rodolfo
and Suplido, 1984; Mendoza, 1992) have proven the connection.”

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50 Communication II

What about the other side?

Another way of developing a critical stance is to keep in mind that your
source’s argument is one side of the argument and there is another side
that you must consider as well. What views does your source oppose?
What would someone with opposing views say about your source’s
argument?

Asking yourself these questions does not mean you must place yourself in
opposition to your source. You may conclude that your source has the
better argument or that your source has the weaker argument. Or you
may withhold judgement, merely pointing out what the crux of the
argument is. “Each of these three positions,” says Giltrow, “can constitute
a critical stance.”

Assessing generalizability
Consider the context of your source’s argument. Consider the bigger
picture of which it is a part. Ask yourself, “What important phenomenon
does the argument address? Why is this an important phenomenon?” For
example, you could say that your source is making a contribution to the
literature on deviant behavior among Filipino adolescents, or that the text
you are summarizing is about the dynamics of marital failure. If you are
in a position to do so, you can go on to assess the value of your source’s
contribution to this bigger picture, or relate it to other contributions.

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Some examples
Below are examples of texts that take a critical stance. Read each one and
identify the strategy/ies used by each author in establishing his/her critical
stance.

Passage 1
(From “Abrogated Lives of Working Women” by Patricia B. Arinto, in Public
Policy Volume II No. 2 April-June 1998)

Camagay’s account of working women in 19th century Philippines also confirms

certain things we have known or suspected about the oppression and
exploitation of women, for example. She takes notes of complaints of abuses
committed against the criadas, the rivalry between the matronas titulares
(licensed midwives) and the traditional hilot and partera, the forcible prostitution
of young girls from the provinces, and the fact that maestras were paid wages
lower than the wages of the male teachers. It is important for these concrete
cases of exploitation be brought to the attention of feminist readers and
activists, that they may see how much better, or worse, off is the situation of
today’s working women. More importantly, such accounts enable us to
appreciate Filipino working women’s struggle for economic independence at
critical moments in our national history.

If there is a limitation to Camagay’s account, it is perhaps the sketchy socio-

economic context that she provides to her portraits of Filipino working women.
At one point she says: “The documents reveal that a number of prostitutes
arrested did come from the provinces. Was this indicative of the hard times in
the countryside? From the population sample of 160 prostitutes, 105 came
from the provinces.” The question is cogent and should not have been left
unanswered. Exactly what was the economic situation in 19th century
Philippines? Why were women working instead of staying at home? What
material conditions led to the participation of women in the labor force?

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Passage 2
(From “International and Intranational Comparisons of Philippine Poverty” by
Solita collas-Monsod and Toby C. Monsod, in Causes of Poverty, edited by
Arsenio M. Balisacan and Shigeaki Fujisaki, University of the Philippines
Press, 1999)

The most glaring difference is that based on the official or national poverty
lines, the Philippines has the highest incidence of poverty among the countries.
Considering that real per capita incomes in the Philippines are not much
different from those in Indonesia and China, this is surprising, to say the
least. And it is even more surprising to show poverty incidence in Thailand
and Malaysia also to be higher than that if Indonesia and China, when their
real incomes per capita, however computed, are three to six times larger.
One may be led to the conclusion that poverty reduction is not a priority
objective in the Philippines.

But this would be an unfair conclusion. In the first place, national poverty
lines are not really comparable. They reflected differences in economic and
social development, and even differences in food and caloric standards. For
example, the Philippine good basket would have a higher proportion of non-
cereals than, say, the Indonesian food basket—and non-cereals are far more
expensive than cereals. Also, the composition and weight of the other basic
needs may be greater. The effect of all these would be to raise the Philippines’
poverty line relative to those of its neighbors.

In the second place, some countries (e.g., Indonesia, China) subsidize the
prices of a number of basic food and other items. This would have the effect
of lowering the poverty line in these countries relative to that of the Philippines.
Thus, other indicators are needed to be able to usefully compare poverty
situations.

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Passage 3
(From “Changing Contexts of Urban Poor Struggles” by Anne Marie Karaos,
in Public Policy Volume II No. 4 October-December 1998)

Berner introduces the notion of locality as a conceptual tool to explain the

process of identity and group formation among the urban poor and their
transformation into political actors. The locality, he says, is a socially defined
spatial entity which provides the “multiple relations and interdependencies
that can be the basis of group building and collective action.” Localities provide
as well the social context where the collective learning of new political practices
can take place.

It is too early to say that these collective efforts that Berner describes would
amount to a significant change in political culture. Berner himself suggests
no such thing. I would content, however, that they constitute significantly
new political practices that add to the poor’s repertoire of political action. But
whether and how these new practices would solidify into a social movement
or into a transformation of political culture is a subject that must wait some
years for an answer.

While Berner dismisses as too restrictive class-based theories of urban social

movements which tend to give historical significance only to movements
oriented toward transforming capitalist urban structures, he nevertheless
echoes the pessimism of urban scholars about the urban poor’s ability to
develop into a movement or a self-conscious political class capable of
confronting the power structures of urban society and transforming the urban
way of life. An eminent scholar on this topic, Manual Castells, regards as
genuine urban social movements only those that are able to effect changes
in urban, political and cultural practices. He submits that a necessary condition
for genuine urban social movement to emerge is the forging of stable ties
between urban poor organizations engaged in “the broader process of class
struggle” (Castells, The City and the Grassroots, 1983).

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Appendix 4-1
Statements of Fact vs.
Statements of Opinion

Imagine yourself in a very simple situation: You are in a room

with two (other) girls. Then read the following statements or
assertions:

1. There are two girls in the room.

2. Their names are Ana and Toni.
3. They are first year college students.
4. Both are good students.
5. Ana is taller than Toni.
6. Toni is older than Ana.
7. Ana looks older than Toni.
8. Ana is in pants; Toni is wearing a skirt.
9. Skirts are going out of style.
10. Ana loves the outdoors more than Toni does.
11. Toni has a very becoming hairstyle.
12. She spends P150 every other week for a haircut.

Which of these sentences will you be able to say are true or false?

Which of these will you be able to say are true or false right away
that is, without having to look or ask for additional information?

Which of these will you be able to answer only after getting more
information?

Which additional information would you be able to get rather easily?

Or even without having to leave the room? Which would need
more time or effort to obtain?

Which of the questions would you not be able to answer with

“True” or “False”? Why not?

You probably were immediately able to say that the following sentences
were true or false:

1. There are two girls in the room.

2. Ana is taller than Toni.
3. Ana is in pants; Toni is wearing a skirt.

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And you would be absolutely right! Why? Because it was possible for you
to verify your answers right away. [The word verify comes from the Latin
verus, which means true.]

You were able to tell whether each statement was true or false by comparing
what each of these statements was saying to the actual situation. You
were able to check each assertion—by direct observation— against reality
or experience.

In other words, the proof to support your claim that each statement is
either true or false was within reach.

You actually saw that indeed there were two of them, both girls; you
actually saw what they were wearing; and you were actually able to see
how tall each one of them was and compare their heights.

Now let’s see which statements you said you would be able to say were
either true or false, but only after you got additional information. If you
pointed out the following, then again you would be absolutely right:

1. Their names are Ana and Toni.

2. They are graduate students.
3. Toni is older than Ana.
4. Toni loves the outdoors more than Toni does.
5. She spends P100 every other week for a haircut.

For you could simply go to Toni or Ana, or both of them, and ask what
their names were and how old they were. You could also ask them if they
were students and what year they were in. You could even ask them
whether they loved the outdoors, or which of them loved the outdoors
more. And you could also ask how much Toni pays for a haircut and how
often she gets one, couldn’t you?

But what if you were too shy to approach them, or they were too shy, or
were extremely wary of strangers? Or if they felt that your questions were
too personal? Well, you could still check the facts by either asking around
or going to the records.

It might take some doing, but the important thing to realize is that you
have a way of finding out, or of verifying the assertions. Take note,
therefore, that a statement of fact need not be true. “Poland is in Asia” is
still a statement of fact because it can be either true or false (in this case
false) and its truth or falsity can be readily verified.

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Remember: A statement or assertion that shows that the writer is

sure (a) that his or her statement can be proven true or false, or (b)
that there is already general agreement about the truth of the
statement itself, is called a statement of fact.

But what about the following statements? How would you verify them?
How would you be sure they are true or false? What would your basis be
for declaring each of them true or false?

1. Skirts are going out of style.

2. Both are good students.
3. Ana looks older than Toni.
4. Toni has a very becoming haircut.

Let’s take one sentence at a time:

Sentence 1: Skirts are going out of style.

How would you propose to ascertain whether skirts are indeed going out
of style?

Would you go around counting, making a tally of how many women or

girls wore skirts and how many wore pants? How would you go about
doing this? Where would you go?

Besides, what would “going out of style” mean? How many more girls in
pants than girls in skirts should there be for you— or anyone—to say that
indeed skirts are no longer in fashion? How many would you have to
count before you—or others—are satisfied that you are correct? Or would
you go by what others say? Who would these “others” be? What if there
were still “others” who did not agree? Would you go back to counting?

Sentence 2: Both are good students.

How would you go about verifying this statement? You might think of
looking up the records at the Office of the Registrar. Or you might ask
their classmates or their professors.

Or, if you don’t think it is being too forward, you might even ask each of
them what her general average or class standing is. Or you might ask
them about their study habits.

Or you might even do all of these.

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58 Communication II

But what are your chances of getting a consensus, or relatively uniform,

or even similar, answers? By now you must have realized that the critical
term here is “good” or “good student.”

What exactly is a good student? Is he or she one who gets goods grades?
One to whom grades are the most important consideration? Or one who
memorizes the text to get all the questions right in an examination? Or
one who reads or investigates beyond what is prescribed even if he she
doesn’t always get a perfect score? One who agrees with the professor—
or the text—all the time? Or one who challenges generally accepted
teachings in search of the truth?

And so on.

The variations and the possibilities are almost limitless. And so probably
will be the responses you will get from as many of the sources of
information you may want to turn to.

Sentence 3: Ana looks older than Toni.

Of course you know that to look older also means to appear or to seem
older. And of course you also know that to look or appear or seem older is
not the same as to be older. (Earlier we said that you could always check
out how old they were, didn’t we?)

On the other hand, how “old” is someone supposed to look? If, for instance,
if both Ana and Toni were 21, or, if one were 23 and the other 21, how
“old” should each one look?

Would your idea of how “old” or how “young” a 23-year-old or a 21-

year-old should look be the same as mine? Or that of your brother’s? Or
your friend’s? Or anybody else’s, for that matter?

Even if you found a number of other people who agreed with you, wouldn’t
there be others who might disagree? I am sure you would say that there
would.

Perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is, “Can we agree on a

definite way of measuring ‘looks’ in the same way that we count years?”

Sentence 4: Toni has a very becoming hairstyle.

This is very much like the previous statement about “looking older”. The
question to ask here is, “What do you mean by ‘becoming’?” You would
probably say, “Something is `becoming’ when it makes someone look good
or better.”

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But then again you would have to go back to the question of “looks”.
With the additional question of what we mean by “good” or “better”. In
short, when does something or someone “look good” or “look better?”

Add to this the original question of whether or not Toni’s haircut at the
moment makes her “look” “good” or “better”. (By the way, if you - or
anyone else - say “better”, you will have to show that you knew how she
looked before.)

Now let us go back to the earlier statement, “She spends P100 every other
week for a haircut,” which we agreed was a statement of fact.

But supposing we stated it this way: “She squanders P100 every other week
on a haircut”? Would it still be a statement of fact? To be able to answer this
question correctly, you will have to look closely at the word “squanders.”

Recall your lessons on connotation in Comm. I. What does the word

“squanders” connote? What does it suggest? What meanings or images
does it call to mind?

A check with the dictionary will tell you that the word “squanders”
suggests wasteful and lavish spending. It would connote extravagance
and ostentation, and a degree of irresponsibility, wouldn’t it?

While you will probably be able to get some agreement on the meaning of
the word “squander”, you may not be as lucky in getting people to agree
on how much you would have to pay for a haircut to be accused of
“squandering” your money—in the same way that you realized it would
not be so easy to get a consensus on what was “good” or “becoming.”

Depending on each one’s means, there would be those who would NOT
think twice about paying as much as P500. On the other hand, there are
those who would not part with even P50 for the same service.

Once more, you can see how difficult—or almost impossible—it would be
to have everyone agree on one answer or one standard or measure.

By now, you must have seen that certain assertions are extremely
difficult—or even impossible—to verify or ascertain beyond the slightest
doubt.

Remember: A statement that indicates that the writer (a) is not

sure that he or she can produce sufficient proof to support his or
her assertion, or (b) realizes that there most probably would be
disagreement, is a statement of opinion.

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You can now see that the statement, “She spends P100 every other week
for a haircut” is a statement of fact; but the statement, “She squanders
P100 every other week for a haircut” is a statement of opinion because of
the connotations or the array of suggested meanings that “squanders”
brings with it—and the disagreement that may result from its use.

This time let’s look at the statement, “Toni’s mother says that she squanders
P150 every other week on her haircut.”

Is it a statement of fact or a statement of opinion?

If you said it is statement of opinion, then that was a perfectly

understandable mistake, since you were most probably misled by the word
“squanders” and our discussion of its connotations.

If, on he other hand, you said it is statement of fact, you would be absolutely
right. What we are verifying here is not whether or not Toni does squander
her money, but whether or not her mother actually said what she is
supposed to have said.

Toni’s mother can confirm or deny whether she actually, can’t she? Of
course, she can.

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Appendix 4-2
Statements of Convention vs.
Statements of Preference

Read the following sentences carefully and tell which of these are
statements of fact.

1. There are twelve months in a year.

2. Green means go; red means stop.
3. The Philippines has over 7,000 islands.
4. An archipelago is a group or cluster of islands.

Take the first sentence: There are twelve months in a year.

We say—or, more accurately, take for granted—that there are indeed 12

months in a year. But what is our basis for saying so? Looking back at
history would tell us that this was not always the case. The calendar we
now use is the Gregorian calendar. Before this there were other ways of
counting days and grouping these into units, such as months. (Can you
mention at least one?) A year did not always have the same number of
months as we know it now; neither did the months have the same number
of days. Then too, there are the Chinese calendar, the Jewish calendar,
the Inca calendar, among many other systems, all of which have different
ways of dividing time.

Take the second sentence: Green means go; red means stop.

Again, we ask ourselves, “Why so? Who said so?” Is there any basis in
experience—or natural law—that tells us that these colors should mean
these things? The only basis we can point to is the agreement arrived
upon sometime in the past by some agencies or persons in authority that
these colors should signify or symbolize—or call forth—certain behaviors.
Would it be possible at some later time for a similar group of agencies or
persons to decide on a change of symbols? What is there to stop them
from doing just that?

Take the fourth sentence: An archipelago is a group or cluster of islands.

That physically—better yet, geographically—there exist groups or clusters

of islands on this planet cannot be denied. To this extent, perhaps, we are
dealing with a fact. But how these groups or clusters are now called, how

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they were given this name is, again, what we may call a “linguistic
decision.” (The word archipelago comes from the Greek archi [chief] +
pelagos [sea]. Another dictionary definition of the word calls it “a sea
studded with many islands.”)

Now, try taking Sentence Five on your own and putting it through a
similar analysis? Try comparing it to the following sentence: “The trees are
relatively young and there is no underbrush.” Is the latter a statement of fact
or is it more than that? How would you justify your answer?

How about Sentence 3? Do you agree that it is a statement of fact? How

would you explain your answer?

A statement of convention is a statement whose “truth” is established by

common consent as found in “rules, regularities of usage, and linguistic
custom” or definitions.

Let’s move on to the next kind of assertion—the statement of preference.

Statements of preference are statements which refer, not only to data that we
perceive through our senses, but to our experience with these data and to
our judgment of these data. These are statements whose truth or falsity may
not be arrived at through means that are absolutely correct or error-free,
as there are no absolute or universally agreed-upon standards of good or
bad, right or wrong, etc. These may be subcategorized into statements of taste,
statements of obligation, and ethical statements

Consider the sentence: I like Philippine mangoes.

This is an example of a statement of taste, the first subcategory of statements

of preference.

Now consider this sentence: Philippine mangoes are of higher quality than
mangoes grown in other parts of the region.

“Higher quality” is a debatable or arguable description. After all, what is

“quality”? Would it be easy to find a consensus on what this means,
particularly with respect to mangoes?

And how does one measure quality? When is it “high” and when is it
“low”? Didn’t you learn earlier that this probability of disagreement is
what makes a statement a statement of opinion?

As stated, however, this sentence is expressing the stater’s judgment or taste (i.e.,
preference) rather than describing the object (mangoes). And we are reminded
that there is no arguing about taste—to each his own; to each her own.

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Sentence 3: The best mangoes in the Philippines come from Cebu.

Like Sentence 2 above, this statement would surely raise a howl, this time
from the people of Zambales, Bulacan, and Davao, to name only three of
our mango-growing provinces. But like Sentence 2, it is an expression of
the choice (preference) of the person making the statement rather than a
description of the qualities of Cebu mangoes.

Sentence 4: Efforts to promote the export of Philippine mangoes should

have the full support of government.

You are perhaps wondering why this sentence is being classified as a

statement of preference when it bears no clue that to you would indicate
preference. On the surface, you may be right and probably have reason to
complain.

Sentence 4 is an example of a statement of obligation, which is the second

subcategory of statements of preference. (An appropriate definition of
obligation, in this context, is “a demand of ideals or conscience”).

Look at it this way: when you use the word should, you are actually obliging
(“constraining by moral force”, according to Webster) the person you are
addressing to do as you say. And, in all probability, you wouldn’t be doing
this unless you were convinced of the “rightness” of your position,
decision, or choice (preference). In other words, you are expressing a value
which you hold strongly. What is the value in this particular case?

Sentence 5: Anyone who says that he hates mangoes cannot rightfully

claim to be a true Filipino.

Now this is a pretty strong statement to make, and rather controversial,

too, don’t you think? First, there is the question of who is a “true Filipino”.
What makes a “true Filipino”? Does it include the person’s preference for
certain types of food? And why the mango? Is it because it is a “local” or
“native” fruit that Filipinos are extremely proud of? Is it because it is
considered —or assumed— by many to be our “national fruit”? Or is it
simply because it is a favorite of many Filipinos? If so, according to the
person making the statement (the stater), then it would be very un-Filipino
not to like it, or worse, hate it.

To repeat, it does sound like a very strong statement whose logic may be
difficult to agree with, and even more difficult to defend. Nevertheless,
the sentence is an expression of the stater’s sense of right (patriotic) and
wrong (un-Filipino). And we expect the stater, of course, to prefer what is
“right” to what is “wrong”.

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Sentence 15 is an example of an ethical statement, which is the third

subcategory of statements of preference. Ethical statements are statements
which involve questions of right and wrong.

We are told that, by definition, it is impossible to obtain universal

agreement on statements of preference, particular ethical statements, as
these are based on individual standards of good and bad/evil, right and
wrong, proper and improper, honest and dishonest, etc. In practice,
however, (or on the ground, as the expression goes) there are some
instances in which we find near-unanimity on ethical – or moral —
judgments, especially within a specific cultural community: murder is evil;
Marcos was a dictator and dictators are an abomination; there should
never be another Holocaust; Mother Teresa was a living saint, children
are innocent and guileless; the family is the cornerstone of society and its
integrity must always be safeguarded.

The last three are examples of what some would call “motherhood
statements”; that is, statements which everyone is expected to endorse.
After all, is there anyone who would admit to being against motherhood?

There are some such statements, however, that are now being seriously
challenged by the times. To cite only a few: crime does not pay; love your
country above everything else; two wrongs do not make a right. Can you
add to this list?

You have to admit that statements of preference are some of the most difficult
statements to make – or accept. Yet they are also some of the most important
that you and I will have to make because they define much of our person
or character, as well as our view of the world. They also determine many
of the most important decisions we will have to make.

Now let’s turn to statements of convention related to our examples above.

Mangifera indica is the scientific name for mango.

It is clear that the fruit’s scientific name is one that was arrived at following
the rules or the system—the conventions—that the science of botany has
adopted.

On other other hand, the statement, Philippine mangoes are very sweet, is
not a statement of preference but a statement of opinion. Why? Well,
because it describes Philippine mangoes by identifying a quality of the
fruit. But it does not necessarily indicate the preference of the stater, who
may or may not necessarily like things sweet.

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Then why not a sentence of fact? Because you may not easily find an
exact measure of sweetness, something that is universally acceptable. What
may be sweet to one may not be sweet to another.

What about the sentence: It is a fact that mango soap and other mango
facial preparations are taking the beauty world by storm?

Do not be misled by the use of fact in the sentence. Some people—

consciously or unconsciously—resort to this to sound more convincing;
consciously, especially when they are not so sure of themselves. Perhaps
to rattle the “opposition”?

The phrase taking [the beauty world] by storm is itself a cliché and an
exaggeration—a hyperbole—used for effect. What exactly do we mean
by it? Offhand, it means that a large number of people have turned or are
turning to these preparations in a relatively short span of time. But then,
how large is large? To the manufacturers? To the competition? To
“converts”? To skeptics?

Then why not call it a statement of preference? Because there is nothing

in the statement that suggests that the stater is happy about the situation
or likes what is happening—if it is indeed happening. He or she may be
dismayed by it, a feeling which is also an expression of preference. On the
other hand, he or she may simply not care one way or the other. And
there may be reason for those who are more objective, more circumspect
—the Food and Drug Administration, perhaps— to make such a statement
in the context of verifying such a claim.

Finally, we come around to examples of sentences about mangoes that

are statements of fact.

Sentence 1: Ripe mangoes are juicier than green ones.

The word juicier may have thrown you off in one of two directions. First,
its naming a quality may have led you to classify it as an opinion. However,
juiciness, being a physical attribute, is not as difficult to measure as some
other quality, such as charm or intelligence. In this particular case, holding
up a ripe and a green mango side by side may end any debate on the
matter.

The other direction in which you may have strayed is that of preference.
Again, the word juicier, by making a comparison, may have suggested
that juiciness is a desirable quality of mangoes, or any other fruit, for that
matter (to the stater, at least). But to arrive at such a conclusion may be a
case of second-guessing, because the stater may actually prefer crisp to
juicy.

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Sentence 2: The word mango comes from the Tamil word mankay.

A check with a Tamil dictionary or with the work of scholars in the

language can determine the truth or falsity of this statement. You may
have mistaken this to be a statement of convention. But ask yourself, was
the etymology (the origin of the word) arbitrarily decided upon by an expert
or a group of experts, or were their conclusions based on scientific data?
If the latter, which most likely it is, then this is a statement of fact.

Sentence 3: Mangoes are indigenous to Eastern Asia.

Like Sentence 6, this statement can be verified by botanists, cultural

historians, or archeologists, or by all three working together, or by anyone
who has access to and can interpret the results of scientific/scholarly work
on the subject.

Statement 4: The legend of the mango is a love story.

This time, we turn to our folklore, to our storybooks, to find out if this
claim is true or false. One question that may be raised, though, is, “What is
a love story?” Is there anyone above 10 who cannot tell one from one that
is not? (We can expect questions, however, from those steeped in the latest
literary theories which challenge established concepts and offer alternative
meanings and readings. . . . But that, as they say, is another story — or,
more accurately — another course altogether!)

Statement 5: China is one of the largest importers of Philippine mangoes.

Records at the Department of Trade and Industries of the Philippines and

or its counterpart in China can easily confirm or reject this claim. What
other government agency or agencies can provide you with pertinent data?

Statement 6: I know someone who refuses to eat or even taste mangoes,

ripe or green.

How do you find out if I’m telling the truth or just telling a tall story?

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Appendix 4-3
Fallacies

How often have you heard or used the term fallacy? What do you
understand by the term? Most likely, the word has some very negative
connotations for you. You most probably used them when engaged in a
discussion or debate, whether spoken or written. You have most probably
used this in protest against your adversary’s arguments. Can you name a
few terms you have used in its place?

Fallacy comes from fallere, Latin for deceive. In general terms, a fallacy is
an error in reasoning, as well as those mistaken beliefs that result from
this faulty reasoning.

Take note, however, that a fallacy is an error in reasoning and should not
be confused with an error of fact.

To be more specific, a fallacy is an “argument” in which the premises

given do not provide the conclusion the needed degree of support.

Fallacies have also been called “pitfalls to be avoided when constructing

an argument.” “Pitfalls” because, while they may appear valid and
convincing, they turn out to be technically incorrect upon closer scrutiny.

There are those who deliberately commit fallacies to win an argument

And there are fallacies that sound valid and convincing. Remember,
however, that this lesson is meant to help you (a) identify fallacies in
competing or rival arguments and (b) defend your position without falling
into—or resorting to—any of these “pitfalls.”

Just as there is deductive argument and inductive argument, there is

deductive fallacy and inductive fallacy.

A deductive fallacy is a deductive argument that is invalid. Its premises

may be false; on the other hand, its premises may all be true, yet it may
still have a false conclusion. For instance:

Premise 1: If the waling-waling is the national flower of the Philippines,

then it is grown in the Philippines.

Premise 2: The waling-waling is grown in the Philippines.

Conclusion: The waling-waling is the national flower of the Philippines.

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(While the waling-waling is grown in the Philippines, particularly in

Mindanao, the sampaguita is the national flower of the Philippines.)

An inductive fallacy is actually an “argument” that appears to be an

inductive argument. But while the premises of an inductive argument
provide adequate support for the conclusion, the premises of an inductive
fallacy do not, so that even if its premises may be true, the conclusion is
not likely to be true. For instance:

Premise 1: The first Filipino student I met in the United States comes from
a wealthy family.

Conclusion: All Filipino students in the United States come from wealthy
families.

(While there are many wealthy Filipinos studying in the United States,
there are those who are not, and are there on grants or scholarships.)

A factual error is a statement that is wrong about facts. For instance:

The Philippines is in the Atlantic Ocean.

Some common fallacies

Different references and different authorities have come up with their
own lists of fallacies, some listing as many as 40.

For our purposes, let’s just take a sampling of the more common ones.

1. Argumentum ad baculum/Appeal to Force (or Fear)

The arguer resorts to force or threats of force to score a point. The

threat may be physical, economic, political, etc. This is equivalent to
the “might makes right” argument.

For example:
“If we do not ratify the Visiting Forces Agreement, we run the risk the
ire of the greatest military force on the planet.” Or, “ . . . or we face
dire economic sanctions from the United States and its allies.”

2. Argmentum ad hominem /Argument Directed at the Man

The arguer resorts to attacking the person or persons making the

assertion.

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For example:
“Those who are asking for a continuation of the peace talks are just a
bunch of misguided rabble-rousers and publicity-seeking members of
the clergy.”

3. Argumentum ad ignorantiam/Argument from Ignorance

The arguer claims that something must be true simply because it has
not been proven false. Conversely, something must be false because it
has not been proven true.

For example:
“How dare you call us thieves? Has anybody been able to prove that
our wealth is ill-gotten?”

“Of course there are UFOs! Show me that they do not exist.”

4. Argumentum ad misericordiam/Appeal to Pity

Also known as “special pleading,” here the arguer appeals to pity to

push for the acceptance of a conclusion.

For example:
“I wish they would drop the charges against my husband. I have spent
countless sleepless nights, my children no longer can face their
classmates, and we all have stopped reading the papers or watching
TV.”

5. Argumentum ad populum/Appealing to the Gallery/Appealing to the

People

The arguer pushes for the acceptance of an argument by appealing—

usually with emotive language—to a large number of people.

For example:
“Think of the huge boost to the economy that would be brought about
by large number of jobs to be created with the approval of the Visiting
Forces Agreement.”

6. Argumentum ad numerum

The arguer contends that the more people there are supporting a
proposition, the greater the likelihood that it is correct.

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For example:
“There are thousands of people attending pro-Gordon rallies. Surely,
he should be reinstated.”
7. Argumentum ad vericundiam/Appeal to Authority

The arguer exploits admiration for the famous to gain acceptance of a

proposition.

For example:
“Kobe Bryant drinks Sprite.” (What is the proposition being pushed?)

8. The Fallacy of Accident

The arguer goes from the general to the specific. The moralistic arguer
and legalistic arguer tries to decide every moral or legal question by a
mechanical application of the rules. The arguer applies a general rule
to particular case even if the “accidental” circumstance of the case
makes the rule inapplicable.

For example:
“How could he have failed math? He is Chinese.” (Implicitly: Chinese
are generally math wizards.)

9. The Fallacy of Converse Accident/Hasty Generalization

It is the reverse of the Fallacy of the Accident. The arguer arrives at

general rule after examining only a few specific cases.

For example:
“I witnessed a live crucifixion in Pampanga during the Holy Week.
Boy! Filipinos are certainly a bunch of masochistic perverts!”

10. Dicto simpliciter/Sweeping Generalization

It is the opposite of the Hasty Generalization. The arguer applies a

general rule to a particular situation; however, the specifics of the
situation may render the rule inapplicable.

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For example:
“I wouldn’t hurry to the board meeting if I were you. Remember, this
is the Philippines. Think Filipino Time.”

11. Non Causa Pro Causa/Post hoc ergo propter hoc

These are also called Fallacies of False Causes.

In the Non Causa fallacy, the arguer identifies something as the cause
of an event when it has not been shown to be the cause.

For example:
“I wear this red shirt every time I take an examination. This is my
lucky shirt.”

In the Post Hoc Fallacy, the arguer assumes something to be the cause
of an event simply because it preceded the event

For example:
“I broke my mirror last Monday while getting dressed, and, true enough,
I flunked the interview.”

12. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc

The arguer claims that, when two events that occur together, one event
must have caused the other, without considering that other factors
may have caused it.

For example:
“All my classmates with long hair get such high grades. I think I’ll
start growing my hair.”

13. Fallacy of the Skewed Sample

The arguer uses as evidence a statistical sample that is not representative

of the universe to which it belongs.

For example:
“There is a groundswell for constitutional change. A survey of the
members of the House of Representatives shows that more than 80
percent are strongly in favor of the move.”

14. Circulus in demonstrando

The arguer presents an argument that is entirely circular.

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For example:
“I’m positive this is correct because it says so in my book. And I know
the book is correct because I wrote it.”

15. The Complex Question/The Loaded Question/Fallacy of

Interrogation/ Fallacy of Presupposition

This is the interrogative form of Begging the Question

The arguer asks a question that embeds another question that has not
yet been asked, and presupposed a definite answer to this question.
For example:
“How many times have you tried shabu?” (What is the embedded
question? The presupposed answer?)

16. Fallacy of Composition

The arguer maintains that a property shared by parts of something is

necessarily is a property or quality of the whole.

For example:
“At least two members of your organization are college dropouts. What
right does it have take part in the review of our curricula?”

17. The Fallacy of Division

The opposite of the Fallacy of Composition. The arguer assumes that a

property or quality of a group is necessarily a quality of each part or
member of that group.

For example:
“She has a Forbes Park address. She must be a millionaire.”

18. The Slippery Slope Argument

The arguer asserts that if one (harmful) event occurs, so will other
harmful events, even it cannot be shown that the harmful events were
caused by the first event.

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For example:
“If parents allow their children to participate in adult conversation,
soon they will demand to take part in adult activities, and, before you
know it, children will be running their parents’ lives.”

19. Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle

The arguer claims that some things are similar, but does not explain or
specify the similarity.

For example:
“Aspirin and heroin are both drugs. If we can buy aspirin over the
counter, we should be able to buy heroin over the counter.”

20. Argumentum ad antiquitatem/Fallacy of the Golden Past

The arguer believes that what is old is good or right. “That’s the way
it has always been.”
For example:
“Why do we have to revise our by-laws? They have been in place for
more than fifty years now.”

21. Argumentum ad novitatem

The arguer asserts the opposite of argumentum ad antiquitatem.

For example:
“I doubt the effectiveness of this method. It is so traditional. I strongly
suggest that we replace it with latest in language-teaching techniques.”

22. Argumentum ad crumenam

The arguer maintains that money is the measure of rightness or

correctness; that those with more money are more likely to be right.

For example:
“Millionaires don’t steal.”

23. Argumentum ad lazarum

The opposite of argumentum ad crumenam. The arguer asserts that the

poor are better, more correct, more virtuous than the rich.

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For example:
“Sidewalks rightfully belong to the poor venders and hawkers. After
all, the rich don’t have any use for sidewalks. They run around—and
run them down—in their cars.”

24. Argumentum ad nauseum

The arguer believes that the more an argument is repeated, the more
likely it is to be true.

For example:
“He’s said it before, he is saying it again. The President has said it a
thousand times—in the papers, on radio, on television. No relative, no
friend, no crony, no gambling partner of his will receive any special
favors during his term of office!”

25. The Fallacy of Bifurcation/False Dichotomy/Either-Or Thinking

Also sometimes called the “black and white” fallacy. The arguer
presents only two alternatives to a given situation, when there are
other possible alternatives.
For example:
“Either we ratify the Visiting Forces Agreement or we open our shores
to foreign invasion.”

26. The Fallacy of the Red Herring

The arguer introduces irrelevant material to the discussion to divert

attention away from the main discussion and towards a different
conclusion.

For example:
Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, at a public hearing, to a minister of the
United Churches of Christ of the Philippines: “You say that the Visiting
Forces Agreement is a form of U.S. imperialism. But the UCCP is based
in the U.S., isn’t it? Why did you not get baptized in the Philippine
Independent Church instead? I was baptized as an Aglipayan [a
member of the PIC] as achild!”

27. The Fallacy of Tu Quoque/You Too

“We who were involved in the execution of Leo Echegaray, in one

way or another have been called murderers. What would you call
many of those in now in death row?”

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28. The Fallacy of Two Wrongs Make a Right

For example:
“Why should I pay taxes when half of these go to the wrong pockets?”

29. The Fallacy of Special Pleading

The arguer does not accept conditions in one case which were applied
in a similar case.

For example:
“All my relatives are banned from having any dealings with
government agencies or being involved in any government project. . .
. But of course the case of Clarita de Lara is something else. She is only
a consultant and she is resigning shortly.”

30. The Fallacy of the Straw Man

The arguer misrepresents someone else’s position to attack it more

easily, does not deal with the original arguments, then claims to have
won the argument.

For example:
“Those holding up anti-death penalty placards are defending a
convicted child rapist. They are pro-rape and pro-incest. Our children
can never safe in the streets and even in their own homes with bleeding
hearts like these in our midst.”

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Module 5
Writing the Critical Essay

I n Module 5, we learned about how to take a critical stance, which is a

skill needed in writing a critical essay.

In this module, we will talk briefly about expressing your critical stance in
the form of an essay. The general term for this type of essay is critical
essay. There are specific forms of the critical essay, such as the reaction
paper and the position paper.

Guzman discusses both types in Units II and III of the Communication

Skills II manual. Her discussion of the position paper is fairly thorough
and requires no elaboration, at least for the purposes of this course. As for
the reaction paper, I merely wish to emphasize the idea (stated in Module
D) that a reaction is not necessarily just a simple statement of like or dislike
for something, or of interest or indifference. At the university level, a
reaction consists of an analytical take on a subject matter.

In Unit II of Guzman, examples of the reaction paper are given. The

examples are reactions to political, social, and cultural events written by
columnists. A close reading of the examples will show that their writers
are basically reacting to or critiquing the events according to a set of criteria.
In some cases, the criteria are explicitly stated while in others they are
implied (and we simply have to piece them together). Now there is no one
set of criteria that applies to all types of phenomena. The selection of criteria
to use in judging or analyzing something depends on, first of all, the
phenomenon or object of analysis itself. Is that phenomenon a movie? A
novel? A political rally? A new law? Each of these must necessarily be
analyzed according to a different set of criteria. It won’t do to analyze a
movie the way you would analyze a novel (although some forget this

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when the movie in question is based on a novel). These are two different
genres, each with their own set of narrative devices and conventions.

A professional reaction paper is one that applies a relevant set of criteria

for evaluating the object of the reaction. (On this basis, we can classify
reactions papers into book reviews, film reviews, letters to the editor,
political analyses, social commentaries, etc.) Comm. II is not the course
that teaches you such sets of criteria. Indeed, no one course can. In the
university, various courses train you in evaluating various genres and
types of phenomena. For example, in Humanities I, you will learn how to
analyze literary texts. In Humanities II, you will be taught how to do a
critical study of paintings and sculptures. Your social science courses should
teach you various sets of criteria for evaluating political and social events.

Pending your taking those courses, let us focus meanwhile on learning to

write critical summaries, or reaction papers that are an expression of a
critical stance vis-à-vis claims made by written sources. Aside from being
something you will be asked to do often in the course of your college
career, writing critical summaries trains you in paying attention to what
someone else is saying and how they are saying it. This in turn is the first
step to being able to make a valid comment or reaction to what that other
person is saying. Also, this is one way of learning or imbibing the modes
of thought and expression in academe.

In Module 5, you were taught four strategies or ways of making a critique:

l Examining the validity of the evidence cited by your source for his/
her claim;
l Looking at the coherence (or lack of it) of your source’s argument;
l Considering points of view or positions that are contrary to that of
your source; and
l Assessing the generalizability of your source’s claim.

You will apply these strategies in writing the critical essay required for
Assignment # 2. The first two strategies require you to simply pay close
attention to what your sources are saying and how they are saying it. The
last two strategies require you to go beyond your source and to find out
how your source relates to other texts or to the larger body of discourses
on his/her subject matter. This means you will need to do some research
and read up on related literature.

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That the assignment requires you to write one critical essay on at least
three sources implies that you must make your choice of sources to critique
on the basis of a main focus or angle. To put it another way, the sources
must be sufficiently related for you to be able to write about them in one
essay. Your essay must have a central idea or thesis (or a central claim, if
you will) that your critique of the three sources will help you establish.

Needless to say, a good reaction paper observes the principles of effective

writing: unity of thought, coherence, grammatical correctness, order, and
conciseness (did I miss a principle or two?).

Also, remember to document your sources both within the text and by
means of a list of works cited. The unit on the critical essay builds on the
module on the report. What you learned in both units you should apply
to the assignment for Unit II.

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History and Moral Identity:

The Challenge of the Philippine Centennial*
We Filipinos often complain that our grasp of history tends to be too
inadequate and our memories too short to enable us to live sensible and
coherent lives. We take to heart George Santayana’s dictum—“Those who
cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—believing that
the key to the present and future lies in a profound understanding of the
past. We expect history to teach us lessons, as if the past contained self-
evident meanings that are just waiting for any reader to unlock.

But I would argue that the past is always selectively revisited, that history
offers no intrinsic messages, and that any reading of history is always
conditioned by present concerns and future hopes, regardless of the extent
to which these are conscious. I would also argue, following Nietzsche,
that in fact, not all remembering is good for life, and that a person who is
incapable of forgetting would be just as crippled as one who cannot
remember anything. Remembering is problematic. The art of remembering
must be combined with the art of forgetting. That which we cannot subdue
we must learn to forget, said Nietzsche. If this is true,

*Keynote Speech, Annual Convention, Association of Major Religious

Superiors of Men in the Philippines, July 14, 1998, Cebu City.

then deciding what to remember and what to forget might be the greatest
challenge a nation would face once it decides to celebrate a milestone like
a national centennial.

I do not think it was easy for the National Centennial Commission to

decide which historical events, places and persons to highlight—and which
to ignore—when they were planning the program for the year-long
centennial celebration. There was, first of all, the question of which date
was more important: June 12, 1898 or August 23, 1896? Should we be
celebrating a revolution that failed (Bonifacio’s), or a declaration of
independence (Aguinaldo’s) that was ignored by another foreign power,
America, only months after it was made? And which hero was most pivotal
in our national history: Rizal, Bonifacio or Aguinaldo? Questions like these
were not easily resolved by the Centennial Commission, which only goes
to show that a walk into the past is possible through many different routes.
As Samuel Butler put it: “Good cannot alter the past, but historians can.”
This is not the fault of historians however. For there is no single historically
correct approach to the past, no single account which best captures its
meanings and messages.

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In the 1970s, the historian Renato Constantino published his version of

Philippine history and called it a “history from below,” history as it would
have been told by the inarticulate masses; a account of what he termed “a
usable past” in contrast to a past burdened by so many myths, a way of
reading history so that it may provide a basis for present tasks and future
goals. Such a view is not popular among conventional historians, who
can only think of any account of the past in terms of whether it is true or
not, rather than in terms of whether it is useful for any purpose. To view
history from the perspective of present goals is, for such historians, to
engage in propaganda rather than scholarship.

But Constantino never conceals his partisanship; the values he espouses,

that of nationalism and democracy, are the same values that inform his
reexamination of our past. The betrayal by the elite of the national interest
at almost every crucial stage in our country’s history was, for Constantino,
an abiding theme. One American historian—Glenn Anthony May, accused
him of “inventing a heroic past in order to produce nationalists in the
present”—a thesis restated by the same author in a recent book entitled
Andres Bonifacio: Inventing a Hero. Historians like May assume that it is
the function of rigorous methodology to ensure that historical research
gets the past right, as if the past were something that spoke for itself and
all that was needed was to represent or record it in its own language.

Yet we know this is not the case. The past yields itself most fully only to
those who come to it with conscious purposes, with their feet firmly planted
in the present, and their eyes turned to the future. Only thus can the past
be a source of illumination. To ask therefore what challenges a review of
the last 100 years offers to us today is not to look for a moral destiny
hidden in layers of history; rather, it is to ask what visions our heroes, the
poets and revolutionaries among our ancestors, spoke about, what dreams
they had, and what every generation has done to achieve these dreams.
For in the words of Richard Rorty, we are what we are, approximates the
will of God or the nature of man, but because certain poets and
revolutionaries of the past spoke as they did.”

But the Centennial Commission took for granted what messages the last
100 years should bring to our present generation. It spoke of national
freedom as though we were still in the age of colonialism. It spoke of
social justice as though we were still living in feudal times. It spoke of
nationhood purely as patriotism. In the name of national unity, it chose to
gloss over the controversies that divided the forces of the revolution instead
of addressing and putting these to rest once and for all. The death of
Bonifacio, for example, or the conflicts within the Katipunan; or the
collaboration of the elite with the American forces; or, closer to our time,
the whys and wherefores of martial law.

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The main reason for this omission in my view was the erroneous assumption
that history is good only for enhancing love of country or pride in one’s
heritage. Which probably accounts for why in June, there was a brisk sale
of flags and the barong tagalog and saya, the visible trappings of identity,
but little analysis of where we stand in the world today. What was
sorely lacking was an orientation to the past as service to the future
and the present. The Centennial would have been far more significant
if it became the occasion for debating national purposes or for
highlighting the features that have characterized our people’s life in
the last hundred years and analyzing these in historical and critical
terms.

Again let me borrow from Nietzsche to illuminate what I am saying

“History,” he says, “pertains to the living man in three respects: it pertains
to him (first) as a being who acts and strives, (second) as a being who
preserves and reveres, and (third) as a being who suffers and seeks
deliverance. This threefold relationship corresponds to three species of
history—a monumental, an atiquarian, and a critical species of history.”

A nation’s monumental history would tell us about its great heroes, the
great moments ad accomplishments in its past, and the virtues that these
heroes and accomplishments exemplified. Confronted by such a
monumental past, says Nietzsche, the man of the present “learns from it
that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and
may thus be possible again; he goes his way with more cheerful step, for
the doubt which assailed him in weaker moments, whether he was not
perhaps desiring the impossible, has now been banished.” On this score
at least, I believe that the Centennial has registered its most important
successes. By reminding us of our heroes and their deeds, and of the crucial
moments when they chose immortality over mere existence, the Centennial
showed us a legacy of greatness worthy of emulation. Such a history
always inspires, even if at times, to do so, it has had to mythify.

It is in the antiquarian and the critical mode of remembering that I feel the
Centennial proved to be most weak. History serves its antiquarian function
when it gives us a sense of our rootedness in a place, surrounded by the
ancestral goods in which our souls may find a home. For the man who
remembers, landscape becomes the resting place of memory. In Nietzsche’s
words: “The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself; he
reads its walls, its towered gate, its rules and regulations, its holidays like
an illuminated diary of his youth and in all this he finds again himself, his
force, his industry, his joy, his judgment, his folly and vices. Here we
lived, he says to himself, for here we are living; and here we shall live, for
we are tough and not to be ruined overnight.”

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We have not seen much of the antiquarian sense in the Centennial except
in the ironic attempt to construct replicas of historic buildings in the so-
called centennial village in the reclaimed grounds of the former American
base in Clark. Meanwhile our old buildings everywhere have lain in ruin,
unable to project even a glimmer of their ancient glory. Our National
Museum is only now about to find a real home. Traces from our past are
rotting in dusty warehouses. Many historical documents remain bundled
in shoe boxes, awaiting the gentle caring hands of librarians and archivists
with a historical sense. Old photographs fade into dust in humid storerooms
even before they could be re-shot for the appreciation of future generations.
The finest antique collections—artifacts of a people’s creativity—are no
longer found in churches or cathedrals or public museums but in the private
homes of the wealthy, where they surrender their pious significations in
favor of their new decorative functions.

The treatment of historic buildings and monuments has been even more
miserable. There is no conscious policy to preserve or even just to re-insert
the old into the new, except when they are needed—like the Barasoain
church—to lend a touch of solemnity to an official function. We have
become a nation of philistine developers, a crazed people engaged in the
relentless erasure of landmarks from the past. Which is why, unlike in
Europe, geography in our country is seldom an incitement to remembering.
Outside of their relatives’ homes, balikbayans find really little to come home
to which would remind them of the contentment they had felt in the
homeland of their youth. All around them they find only the grim
reminders of the desolation and poverty from which they sought to escape.

But more than this, the Centennial has had no critical value. It has failed
to provide the occasion to criticize and condemn aspects of our past on
which some surviving institutions or practices worthy of being junked
might still be anchored. Critical history examines what we have become
in the hope of freeing ourselves from the chain of past errors. It is through
this that history performs an emancipatory or liberative function.

A good example is the place of our national minorities in the nation’s life.
Critical history would have told us how the aberrations and crimes of the
past produced the minoritization and inferiorization of Mindanao and
the Cordilleras. If done well, such an exorcism of an episode in our history
would have permitted us to condemn past deeds and free ourselves from
their living residues. It would have enabled us to take the first real step
towards correcting a historic injustice, and thus pave the way to forgiving
ourselves as a nation.

But the celebratory character of the Centennial overshadowed any concern

for rectifying collective errors and crimes whose effects continue to haunt
us to this day. For it was decided early on that the centennial should not

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reopen old wounds or resentments. It was partly for this reason that the
Centennial expressly avoided any discussion of the circumstances
surrounding the assassination of Andres Bonifacio and of Antonio Luna.
Some organizers suggested that this might embarrass some families or
even entire provinces, or pit one ethnic group against another.

In view of all of this, it is no longer surprising that the Centennial

celebrations came and went without creating lasting impressions on the
national consciousness. The past failed to teach us its lessons for the simple
reason that we forgot or refused to raise the right questions. Therefore, it
was natural that the centennial would leave no challenges. Its exploration
into our past had been cursory and had explicitly avoided controversy.

But I think it is never too late to interrogate the past, to root out past
crimes and errors in the hope of rectifying the living marks they have left
behind. It is true for individuals and institutions; it is true for nations. I
believe it is not too late to examine what we have become in the last one
hundred years in the light of the moral identity that our ancestors had
helped forge through decades of struggle. For this is what history is all
about. As Milan Kundera puts it: “The struggle of people against power is
a struggle of memory against the vicissitudes of forgetting forms the core
of our moral identity.

Moral identity is an interesting concept for it signifies the principles that

animate a country’s progress into the future. it summarizes the hopes
that we associate with the social movements that have shaped our nation’s
destiny. It is my belief that Filipino moral identity as it has evolved up to
the recent past contains at least five elements:

1. First is the quest for national freedom, the belief that we Filipinos are a
nation equal to other human beings, capable of governing ourselves,
and entitled to live in freedom within the community of nations.
2. Second is the quest for democracy, the belief that we must establish a
republican democracy, a system in which every citizen has equal rights
as any other, where the state exists to serve and protect the interests
and welfare of its citizens both as individuals and as members of the
collectivity, and where the people are sovereign.
3. Third is the quest for economic self-reliance, the yearning to be a self-
reliant nation, hoping to achieve enduring economic growth through
the development of its people and natural resources.
4. Fourth is the quest for social justice, the belief that the first task of
government is to ensure the provision of the basic needs of the people,
the elimination of poverty, and the equalization of opportunities for
advancement, even if this entails expropriation and redistribution of
property like agricultural land.

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5. And lastly, the quest for ecological balance, the belief that this piece of
earth on which our nation stands, our natural environment and all
that it has, is not something we inherited from our ancestors but is
rather something we borrowed from our children, that we are merely
the stewards of this place on the planet, not its owners. This means
acceptance of the principle that property rights are naturally limited
by our collective obligations to our children who will inherit the
environment.

We do not need history to inform us about our moral identity, for these
values are very much an integral part of our present consciousness. But
we need history to remind us of the conditions that have stood in the way
of the realization of these values through successive generations. We need
history to tell us about the origins of the institutions and laws that contradict
the basic values that to this day animate our social movements. We do not
need history to tell us about our supposed destiny as a people, for there is
no such thing apart from the destiny we create by our actions. We only
need history to remind us how we have come to live the way we do in
spite of what we believe in, hoping that such a realization may produce
the cheerfulness we need to goad us in the effort to achieve our country.

It is obvious that the national purposes I have laid out here as components
of our moral identity would acquire their particular meanings in relation
to the times we live in. The demands of national freedom, for instance,
would have to be re-contextualized in recognition of the realities of
globalization. The era of colonial conquest is long past. But there are new
modes of integrating national economies into the logic of larger markets
beyond the control of nation-states. And indeed advances in transportation
and communication have made the boundaries of nations porous and
almost meaningless. Our people have become phenomenally mobile. They
have recreated the Filipino family and culture against all odds on foreign
land. Filipino identity has acquired new meanings when recast as
oppositional identity in hostile social environments. One-tenth of the
Filipino nation now resides outside the Philippines, making us truly a
modern diasporic people. We cannot continue to treat Filipinos who have
adopted the citizenship of their host countries as lying outside the vision
of responsibility of our nation. For they remain very much a part of the
nation we have become. All these realities we must take into account as
we grapple with the demands of nationhood and sovereignty.

I am afraid the OCW phenomenon, which originated in the ‘70s in a

temporary program to alleviate domestic unemployment, has now become
a permanent feature of the national life. Yet the institutions we have
invented to address this phenomenon have remained ad hoc—provisional,
and grossly inadequate to respond to the complex needs of an overseas
population. We have to abandon the fiction that the OCW is just a

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temporary artifact of a crisis-ridden economy. The truth of the matter is

that an entire culture has grown around it, spawning its own system of
values and norms, career patterns and social organization. It is time we
awaken up to this as a nation, and assess what it means to our institutions
and the national life in the long run.

There is, too, the persistent problem of poverty, which has mocked all
claims to recent “tigerhood” or economic growth. The election of Erap
Estrada is the clearest and most dramatic re-statement by our people that
they demand a government that will prioritize basic needs over economic
growth, social justice over development. For some strange reason,
notwithstanding the fact that a mass movements for change in history
have always been underpinned by social justice concerns, the articulation
of political goals has consistently regarded this as only auxiliary to national
freedom. But this would not be surprising at al if viewed historically. The
most eloquent articulators of nationhood after all have always been the
landed elite. Neither in Kawit, Cavite, nor at EDSA was the clamor for
social justice given the prominence it deserved.

Year after year, with every administration, the lip service paid to the goal
of eliminating poverty has always been nullified by the realities of the
property system. The urban poor must squat because so much idle city
land is owned by speculators and developers. The rural poor must move
to the uplands, exerting further pressure upon an already critically
threatened environment, because all available farm lands are privately-
owned, in many instances, awaiting conversion to non-agricultural use.
it all seems foolish to think that poverty can ever be eliminated without a
decisive program of asset reform throughout this archipelago. Yet year
after year, every government pretends that economic growth will soon
trickle down to the poor.

It is poverty and persistent economic insecurity that is at the base of the

many other problems of our society, from graft and corruption to
criminality, from drug addiction to government inefficiency, and from
warlordism to vote-buying in elections. Indeed so much of the
environmental crisis we confront today is in large measure also an effect
of economic desperation.

The problems we face as a young nation may seem intimidating, but their
roots are basic. A little critical history would have refreshed for us their
origins in the unequal distribution of land, which spawned an oligarchical
political system, and a culture of patronage, inferiority, and dependency.

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As we can see, the real challenge of the national centenary is to rewrite

our past in the light of our moral identity, or, if I may borrow the words of
Nietzsche for the last time, “The best we can do is to confront our inherited
and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern,
discipline, combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new
habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers
away.”

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Clinton in Barong Culture and

Globalization in the Time of APEC
Michael L Tan

APEC is viewed through the lens of economic anthropology. Thus while

APEC typifies consolidated and homogenized economic globalization, the
same globalizing forces give rise to heterogeneous cultural expressions
that are manifested in various forms of nationalism and thriving local
cultures. In the end, APEC is both powerful and vulnerable; for while it
shapes economies and reconfigures cultures, it is also being culturally
reconfigured.

How does one relate Asia pacific economic cooperation (APEC) to culture?
APEC seems to be, for want of a better metaphor, an economic animal.
We have also been told that economics has nothing to do with culture. Ye
the debates around APEC do impinge around issues of culture. This essay
seeks to move away from formalist definitions of economics and economic
systems and to consider the possibilities of looking into economics as
culture or perhaps even more radically, culture as economy and economics.

Its perspectives are drawn from economic anthropology, which views

economics as being embedded in society and culture. My focus is on APEC
as a transnational body formed out of divergent economic interests and
on how these dynamics translate into cultural expressions, mainly
globalism and nationalism.

APEC the ideology of globalization

The main question to be addressed in this paper is: Does APEC represent
globalization, and if it does, are we witnessing a case of economic
globalization giving rise to cultural globalization?

To answer these questions, let us first look at an advertising supplement

published in the Far Eastern Economic Review’s 27 November 1997 issue
that was meant to mark APEC’s Vancouver summit. APEC is composed
of 18 nations around the Pacific basin, with about 40 percent of the world’s
population and with activities that produce more than half of the world’s
gross domestic product (GDP).

It is interesting that APEC would have an advertising supplement—five

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full pages—in a leading Asian economic magazine. After all, APEC is not
a direct producer or distributor of goods. The advertising is there because
APEC needs to be. The blurbs for APEC declare its potential for a new
global economic order, capitalism triumphant, linking the world together
and ushering in a new millennium of peace and prosperity. The advertising
supplement is in fact entitled ‘Forum for the Future.’

How does culture fit in? I will argue that APEC is a proclamation of
possibilities. The very vision of free trade remains challenged but here we
find an instance where the cultural sphere precedes the economic. The
images of APEC are starkly ideological, obstinately projecting a particular
worldview. The Far Eastern Economic Review supplement notes, almost in
passing, that there is a financial crisis in Southeast Asia, but goes on to
say that the Vancouver meetings are there ‘to digest recent eye-catching
progress.’ The worldview is of global cooperation and inevitable progress.
This theme of progress permeates through all of APEC’s history.

But moving away from this theme of progress and evoking other images,
we think of the hastily constructed roads leading to the villas in Subic for
the Asia Pacific’s leaders. We see a row of men, standing side by side like
fraternity brothers posing for a homecoming. Think of the preparations
for the Vancouver summit in 1997, somewhat muted as Asia’s tigers turn
into cubs. Think of the Newsweek cover declaring Vancouver as the new
capital of Asia. Think of media coverage, of President Clinton assuring
the world that all’s well with the world by going off to play golf.

APEC’s representation of globalism is ideological in the way it obscures

many other images. Its press releases have a limited time frame, never
mentioning the many currents that have in fact linked peoples and
communities for many centuries. We are made to forget the migrations—
more than 40,000 years ago—from northern Asia, across the Bering Straits,
into the Americas: the First Nations of Canada; the native American
Indians of the United States (US); the Mayans of Central America; the
Incas of South America and the may other groups, now called indigenous,
that first colonized the other side of the Pacific.

Ironically, it was another age of colonialism—much more rapid, much

more violent—that restored the linkages around this Pacific rim. Spanish
colonialism and the Acapulco trade, for example, created channels for an
extensive exchange of ideas, material culture and even of genes across
three continents: Europe, Central America and Asia. (Three years ago at
a conference in Brazil, I met a Cuban physician who was excited about
meeting a Filipino. It turned out his grandmother had been a Filipina.)

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In the last decade of the 20th century, APEC almost seems inevitable, a
convergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) ad of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a consolidation of
the New Economic Order. For all intents and purposes, the consolidation
is total and efficient. It assures you that the NcDonald’s hamburger you
eat in Manila, with a little variation, will be served with the same standards
in Washington DC. It assures you that you are now truly a global citizen,
the Nike you wear is assembled from components and labor of at least 10
different countries around the Pacific and beyond.

The consolidation is presumed because it is often most visible in aspects of

culture such as cuisine, music, cinema, fashion and the use of English as
lingua franca. It is important that this image of globalization be propagated
for it becomes self-fulfilling, with APEC representing a world where borders
and barriers are torn down, a world united by cosmopolitan preferences.

It is the globalization, too, that is feared by many, sometimes even bringing

together opponents with diverse ideologies who see globalization as an
erosion of cherished values and traditions. Running through these fears,
too, is that of a dominant West destroying ‘Asian values’. The debates
then are no longer those of economic and political ideologies but of culture.
Yet, and this is an important point, political economy remains the arena
in which these debates take place.

Globalization is not homogenization

We presume that there is a homogeneity in the dominant culture,
particularly that of the US, and that this dominance translates into total
hegemony. We presume, too, that the dominated cultures offer no
resistance. APEC reifies our fears of this global hegemony, of world tastes—
and consumerism—churned out of offices in New York and Tokyo.

Arjun Appadurai (1991) first described an emerging global ethnoscape,

based not so much on cultural hegemony than on the complex
consequences of globalization of capital and labor—one that has led to
numerous diasporas and deterritorialization. As Filipinos well know, this
diaspora has been going on for many years, beginning with the migration
of Filipino farm labor to Hawaii and the US west coast early in this century
and moving through several waves into the 1970s when the Marcos
dictatorship encouraged massive deployment of contractual overseas labor
to bring in foreign exchange. In the 1980s ad 199s, much of this labor
migration took place within the region, to countries like Japa, Hong Kong,
Singapore and Malaysia.

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for kicker: globalization is feared by many.

Yet it is doubtful that APEC will facilitate more of such labor movements.
Unlike the European Community’s provisions for free movement of labor,
protectionism is apt to be more for the norm in APEC when it comes to
the movement of people across borders. In fact, we already find efforts
from neighboring countries like Malaysia to curtail this movement of labor.
Yet we also find that, in spite of efforts to regulate them, these migratory
movements continue unabated, spurred by economic hardship as well as
political conflicts. With or without APEC we find hordes of the global
homeless living in inhospitable countries, returning ‘home’ only for a brief
respite.

Amidst this deterritorialization we will find the creation of new boundaries,

of new localities. Look hard enough and you will find, eve within the
member nations of APEC, cultural loci in various stages of development,
carrying old and new forms of nationalism, whether among the
undocumented populations of Filipinos and Indonesians in Malaysia, or
the Burmese refugee populations in Thailand. The reluctant host countries
are aware of these new loci, and their inherent dangers: away from home,
nationhood becomes an even more powerful concept.

Add, too, the dimension of time as we examine nascent nationalisms.

What happens when the diasporas come to span several generations?
Already, we see Asian-Americans emerging as potent political forces. Closer
to home, we have seen how the Chinese migration at the turn of the
century from the southern Chinese provinces of Fuijan and Guandong to
several countries in Southeast Asia has become a vital factor in shaping
the region’s political economy, as well as its culture.

It is also curious how the movements are not unidirectional. We find young
Filipino-Americans—quite often born ad raised in the US and unable to
speak Filipino—coming back to look for their roots. Young Vietnamese-
Americans, too, have gone home to the cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh,
sometimes risking the wrath of their staunchly anticommunist parents
who had left Vietnam in the 1970s and 1980s. And the there are the
businessmen of Chinese ethnicity who upon their return to China to invest,
are being hailed as ‘patriotic overseas Hua’. This massive inflow of capital
back into China, including large amounts from the ‘renegade’ province of
Taiwan, would not have been possible without the current wave of
globalization.

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The point here is that globalization is not just a movement toward

homogenization. In fact, we may find greater differentiation. This
differentiation does not follow the traditional distinctions between North
and South or East and West. I have also tried to emphasize that
globalization is not new. The temporal dimension needs to be examined,
both for past trends as well as those currently being formed.

Neocolonialism transformed
Does all this mean then that we have indeed come into a postcolonial age
and that perhaps talk of ‘neocolonialism’ has become archaic? No. In fact
it may be argued that neocolonialism may eve be on its second wind. The
imperial forays in the form of military invasions may have needed but
certainly there is reason to be concerned with the continuing skewed power
relationship.

Amidst the images of prosperity and Asian versions of Horatio Alger-

type success stories, the cold statistics still point to worsening economic
inequality within and among nations. The Economist (29 September 1997)
cites United Nations Conference on Trade and Development UNCTAD
figures showing that, in 1965, the average income per capita of the world’s
wealthiest 20 percent was 31 times that of the income of the poorest 20
percent. By 1990, the wealthiest quintile’s income was 60 times that of the
poorest. These are cold statistics indeed. But they do not quite capture the
tensions that come with the inequality, and the continuing dynamics, of
resistance.

I do not agree with Samuel Huntington’s thesis (1996) of ‘a clash of

civilizations’ mainly because he speaks of power blocs, playing on the old
divisions of East and West. I am more inclined to suggest that the ‘clashes’
will be less global than regional and national. The loci that I referred to
earlier rise out of domestic tensions. Global developments will undoubtedly
be significant but the crucial developments will be in the many loci of
resurgent nationalisms. For instance, the fears of global Islamic
fundamentalism are exaggerated but at the same time, it must be
recognized that the currents of this fundamentalism will find expression
in many local movements. Nationalism along lines of political, particularly
class, ideology will subside. This is not the say that political ideologies are
dead; they will, quite simply, assume new forms.

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for kicker: Cultural survival hinges on diversity.

The new will often invoke the old. The Zapatista movemet in Chiapas,
Mexico reincarnates ancient Mayan culture to rebel against a political
order seen as subservient to the interests of imperial globalism (Gossen
1996). Such forms of nativism and revivalism are not new: we find them
repeated over and over again in the histories of the APEC countries. Often
dismissed as local revolts, they in fact move into the collective consciousness
of nations, offering a counterpoint to dominant ideologies that equate
modernization with progress.

The importance of recognizing new cultures, new localities, new

nationalisms, comes with the fact that these new configurations carry
powerful messages that identify death with integration into the New
Economic Order and survival with the carving out of new niches from a
ancient past. The message, too, is that resistance allowed us to survive
and that resistance will continue to allow us regions of refuge (Aguirre-
Beltran 1979) where, as in nature, survival hinges on the maintenance
and growth of diversity. It is not ‘narrow nationalism’ or xenophobia that
we speak of here, but of a pragmatic, critical perspective that challenges
the old axiom of ‘West is best.’ It is particularly intriguing to look at these
signs of resistance in the flow of information.

Global babbling
As many social analysts have pointed out, one distinctive characteristic of
the current wave of globalism is that we see the transnational flow not
only of goods but also of information. This transnational flow of
information is a vital component of trade liberalization, with one of the
highlights of APEC’s Manila meeting being the lifting of tariffs on
information technologies.

No doubt, this explosion of information takes place in the context of skewed

power relations but it is useful to look at how, exactly, the information
flows mirror changing relations. Video Valium (aka CNN) batters us with
Ted Turner’s interpretations of the words, Princess Diana and of Mother
Teresa, interspersed with ads from the humanitarian agency CARE. A
voice drones about how the ‘proportion of humanity living in absolute
poverty has declined’ through the years, followed by the deceptive ‘Where
there’s hope, there’s CARE.’ The CARE ads capture many aspects of global
information flow: an optimistic, almost naive, and some would say
deceptive, view of global poverty, including their own role as humanitarian
aid agencies in reducing that poverty. But CNN and CARE are only part
of the picture.

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They are products of a particular historical milieu that is marked and

shaped by what Featherstone (1995) calls global babbling. Featherstone
points out that this is no longer a simple matter of bringing in images of
‘the distant exotic’ into the homes of Americans or Europeans. Rather, we
now see a global broadcasting of the ‘discordant clashing of cultures’,
where the natives can now babble back to the masters, challenging the
civilizing mission of the West. Perhaps more importantly, the West is now
in the position where it knows it needs to listen, even if it continues to do
so in a condescending and patronizing way. So when CNN gives special
coverage to the Cairo International Conference on Population and
Development or the Beijing Women’s Conference, or to the Kyoto meeting
on global warming, that is well and good. The messages may often become
diluted and there is always the risk of cooptation, but these otherwise
muted voices are now given a forum that goes beyond mere tokenism.

The Philippines perhaps offers us an interesting case study in the way we

grapple with dilemmas in this information age. We want so much to be
western and are in fact considered by the rest of Asia—sometimes with
scorn—as the most westernized. Yet we are known too for our nationalism,
for a political culture considered radical and one forged out of a resistance
to a dictatorship that was closely tied to the US. For all the talk about our
being western, the West is in fact a distant entity, and messages developed
from western tutelage ring hollow. From AIDS to anti-smoking campaigns,
the aping of the West by our ad agencies has failed dismally. Those slick
and expensive ads probably do little to shape consumer patterns. I would
even say that the globalization of ‘taste’ in the Philippines has not happened
at all. For instance Filipino overseas workers usually expect to find Brut
cologne or Avon cosmetics in Amsterdam’s duty-free shops. Consumption
may have been globalized but it is spurred and shaped by local culture or,
in the case of Avon, by a local sales force.

Introductory anthropology courses teach that culture consists of what is

shared, but we forget that culture exists in situ, in difference, sometimes
in opposition. We are what they are not. When the differences disappear,
the rationale for culture weakens, and we search for new grounds to
distinguish ourselves. It should not be surprising then that our nationalism
draws, increasingly from our indigenous Filipinos. Despite the tendency
towards crass commercialism, the use of ‘indigenous’ fabrics and designs
for our clothes and the rise of ethnorock do reflect the new processes of
localization amidst globalization. Without cultural anchors—when the
moorings provided by ideology are suddenly cut off—we lowland Filipinos
now turn to ‘the other’, to the ‘natives’, realizing that they have culture
and the they are native because they resisted the encroachments of Western
colonization. This is seen not just in the Philippines but in countries as
diverse as Thailand, China, Canada, Mexico.

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Such trends can sometimes be quite reactionary, specially when they

invoke mythical and often romanticized or even fictitious values from the
past. Take the case of the Far Eastern Economic Review supplement I
mentioned earlier. That issue also had an advertising supplement on the
Philippine Centennial. It described the features of the Philippine National
Centennial Exposition or Expo Pilipino. Among others, the Expo offers
this: ‘Genuine tribesmen will be living in specially built tribal villages, and
visitors will be able to experience ritual dances, taste the food and see
traditional arts and crafts’. The plan recalls memories of the St. Louis
Exposition in the US at the turn of the century, where Filipino tribespeople
were put on display as a representation of the Filipino: primitive and
backward and therefore justifying American occupation of the Philippines.
Today’s Expo Pilipino, too, has lowland Filipinos representing the tribal:
ancient and timeless and genuine.

Nationalism as difference
But let us return to the APEC leaders standing in a row, with Clinton
towering over them and wearing that elegant barong made out of Philippine
fabrics and silk. Does that make him more Third World, more Filipino?
His wearing a batik shirt the previous year did not make him more Third
World, more Indonesian. These subtle nuances in the manipulation of
images call for closer attention, particularly in the way the images try to
blur the differences, projecting the image of global citizens.

Yet, again, it is not all domination and hegemony and manipulation. The
market has its own logic. So while the market tries to universalize taste,
the tearing down of borders actually creates new problems.

We have seen that APEC has had a turbulent history, with strong
opposition raised against globalization, most visibly from Malaysian Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamad and more discreetly from ministers in
countries such as Indonesia. These expressions of nationalism take many
forms, spilling into other areas as in Mahathir’s routinized tirades against
neocolonialism and the invocation of ‘Asian values’ as a key to survival.

In so many ways APEC epitomizes globalization. But we should not forget

that while the image-makers have decentered the world, APEC still does
not include half of the world: Europe, Africa, many parts of Latin America,
and the former Soviet Union. In fact, APEC is neither Pacific (it excludes
many South Pacific nations) nor Asian in its exclusion of the entire
subcontinent of South Asia. APEC’s importance comes not just with what
it is attempting to become, but also in what it is not. The Pacific basin is
not, and will never be, the world.

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for kicker: APEC epitomizes globalization.

APEC presents a case study of how human visions and fears are
crystallized. it spurs us to reexamine the process of acculturation,
assimilation, syncretism. APEC is not just, as the Manila People’s Forum
on APEC declared in 1996, four adjectives in search of a noun. APEC is a
construct, still unrooted in time and in space. It is therefore all the more
intriguing in the way it moves us: powerful in the way it is shaping
economies and yet vulnerable in the way it is reconfiguring, as well as in
the way it is being reconfigured, by culture.

Note

This article is an expanded version of a paper originally delivered at a

symposium sponsored by the Philippine APEC Study Center (PASCN)
held in December 1997.

References

Aguirre-Beltran, G. 1979. Regions of Refuge. Society for Applied

Anthropology Monograph No. 12. Washington, DC: Society for
Applied Anthropology.
Appadurai, A. 1991. Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a
Transnational Anthropology. In R Fox (ed). Recapturing Anthropology:
Working in the Present. Sta Fe New Mexico: School of American
Research Press.
Bello, W & J Chavez-Malaluan, (eds). 1996. APEC: Four Adjectives in Search
of a Noun. Manila: Manila People’s Forum on APEC.
Featherstone, M. 1995. Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and
Identity. London: Sage Publications.
Gosen, G. 1996. Maya Zapatistas Move into the Ancient Future. American
Anthropologist 98(3): 528-538.
Huntington, S. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations. New York: Simon ad
Schuster.

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 Unit III Module 6 99

Unit III
The Concept Paper

Thus far, we have discussed and tried our hand at writing reports and
reaction papers. These are the two most common types of academic
discourses. But they are not the only types. In this unit, we turn our
attention to a third type of academic discourse, the concept paper.

At the risk of preempting Module 6, let me state at the outset that a concept
paper is an essay that defines or clarifies a concept or idea. From this
definition, it is obvious why we are focusing on the concept paper in this
Unit: like the report and reaction paper, it is the kind of essay that university
students like yourselves write a lot of. That is, as students you are often
asked to define a term or to explain what it means.

Sometimes the definition required is no more than a paragraph or two in

length. But more often than not, you must come up with a whole essay to
explain the meaning of an idea. Concept papers can be quite complex, as
you will find from our discussion. I refer in particular to concept papers
that are articulations of a theoretical or conceptual framework. There is
also the special type of concept paper the usefulness of which extends
beyond the walls of academe—the concept paper leading to a project
proposal.

The Unit consists of two modules:

Module 6 - An Introduction to the Concept Paper

Module 7 – The Concept Paper II: Conceptual Frameworks

The modules build on the previous ones. You will find, if you haven’t
done so yet, that the academic papers we are discussing in this course are
interrelated and at some point, the lines between them become blurred.
Many a report becomes a critical summary, which is really a kind of
reaction paper, and many reaction papers, particularly those reacting to
concepts, do share some characteristics with the concept paper. For the
sake of analysis, we distinguish among these types of writing. But
remember that the skills you learned in the previous Units are skills you
will need for this Unit as well. At the same time, I hope you will learn new
ones.

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 Module 6
An Introduction to
the Concept Paper

What is a Concept?
We begin with this question because the key word in “concept paper” is
really concept.

Briefly put, a concept is an idea. According to Webster’s Ninth New

Collegiate Dictionary, the word comes from the Latin conceptum, meaning
“something conceived in the mind: thought, notion” and “an abstract or
generic idea generalized from particular instances.”

Thus, concept papers are essays that clarify or explain an abstract idea or
thought. The idea could be a key term or word like “city” or “patriarchy”
or “the middle classes.” Or it could be a method or approach to something,
such as “a post-structuralist approach to literary analysis” or “a semiotic
approach to art appreciation.” The concept being explained or described
could also be a policy, such as “deregulation,” or a project, such as the
“search for outstanding young scientists” or “declaring the UP Open
University as the national center of excellence in open and distance
learning.”

These different types of concepts lead to different types of concept papers,

which we shall describe in the sections that follow.
102 Communication II

Defining Key Terms

The essay that defines an abstract term is the easiest to identify as a concept
paper. In such an essay, the meaning of the abstract term is given or stated,
or clarified. For example:

Daycare is the institutional provision of care-taking services to

young children, these services including feeding, supervision,
shelter, and instruction. (qtd. in Giltrow, 1995, p. 189)

A computer virus is a computer program or section of programming

code which is designed to sabotage a computer system by causing
itself to be copied into other parts of the system, often destroying
data in the process. (The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, 1991;
qtd. in Guzman, 2000, p. 135)

This purpose or function of the essay that defines—i.e., to clarify the

conventional meaning of a term—is something it has in common with
dictionaries. (Dadufalza, 1996, p. 184).

A second purpose of the essay that defines an abstract term is “to stipulate
the meaning of a term by limiting, extending or redirecting the reference
or sense in which the term is commonly understood or to use in a special
way a term borrowed from another field of knowledge to suit the special
meaning intended in the field in which it is made to apply” (Dadufalza,
1996, p. 184). Consider the example below:

Atmosphere is the mood pervading a literary work, setting up in

the reader expectations as to the course of events, whether happy
or (more commonly) disastrous. (A Glossary of Literary Terms, qtd.
in Dadufalza, 1996, p. 190)

The foregoing examples follow the classical pattern of a formal definition

which includes: (a) the term defined (definiens), (b) the class (genus) to
which it belongs, and (c) the characteristics (differentiae) which distinguish
or differentiate the term from other members of the same class (Guzman,
2000, p. 132).

According to Giltrow (1995, p. 189) the pattern is one of “enlargement to

classify” followed by “reduction to differentiate.”

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 Unit III Module 6 103

Activity 6-1
See if you can identify the parts of a formal definition in the sample
definitions given. The samples are reproduced below. Underline
once the definiens; underline twice the genus; and underline thrice
the differentiae.

1. Daycare is the institutional provision of care-taking services to

young children, these services including feeding, supervision,
shelter, and instruction. (qtd. in Giltrow, 1995, p. 189)

2. A computer virus is a computer program or section of

programming code which is designed to sabotage a computer
system by causing itself to be copied into other parts of the
system, often destroying data in the process. (The Oxford
Dictionary of New Words, 1991; qtd. in Guzman, 2000, p. 135)

3. Atmosphere is the mood pervading a literary work, setting up

in the reader expectations as to the course of events, whether
happy or (more commonly) disastrous. (A Glossary of Literary
Terms, qtd. in Dadufalza, 1996, p. 190)

Now, the foregoing are just one-sentence definitions. They do not a concept
paper make. Concept papers of the type we are considering in this section
are, according to Guzman, “basically extended definition[s].” They provide
not only the classification and distinguishing characteristics of the term
being defined, but also its provenance or origin, its causes, its effects or
consequences, its mechanics, its uses, and the like.

For example, the extended definition of computer virus is as follows:

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104 Communication II

A computer virus is a computer program or section of programming

code which is designed to sabotage a computer system by causing
itself to be copied into other parts of the system, often destroying
data in the process.

The figurative use of the word virus is based on the ability of the
computer virus to replicate itself within the organism.

The computer virus was originally a concept of science fiction: it

was used in David Gerrold’s book When Harlie was One (1972),
and also in John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider in 1975. The first
real virus was the subject of a computer science experiment in
November 1983, presented by American computer scientist F.
Cohen to a seminar on computer security. When Cohen had
introduced the concept to the seminar the name virus was
apparently suggested by Len Adleman, and the results of the
experiment were demonstrated a week later.

By the second half of the eighties, the virus had become a serious
hazard to individual and corporate computer user. Because the

code copies itself into the computer’s memory and the causes havoc,
it became advisable to avoid using floppy discs which might
conceivably contain a virus—freeware and discs supplied by clubs,
for example. (7) Considerable financial loss was suffered as a result
of the epidemic, not to mention research time and valuable data:
in one famous incident, London’s Royal National Institute for the
Blind temporarily lost six months’ worth of research after being
attacked by a virus contained in files on a floppy disc. (8) A number
of software companies began to offer virus detection programs
and “good” viruses which could guard against infection (this kind
of virus was sometimes known as a vigilante virus).

—Adapted from the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, 1991

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 Unit III Module 6 105

The foregoing is a rather basic example, involving as it does a term about

which there is little confusion or argument in the discipline from which it
comes. Often, however, at the university level many of the key terms you
have to deal with are complex and are variously defined even within the
same discipline. In this case, your definition—or concept paper—is
expected to take into account its various definitions. Here’s an example
from Edward Berner’s Defending a Place in the City (1997):

Conventional definitions of the urban poor tend to combine

impressionistic descriptions and analytical categories regarding
physical, social and economic aspects. The newsletter Anawim (3/
1987, 4), in a typical approach, delineates the group as follows:

The urban poor have been commonly associated with

unemployment, shanties, overcrowding, filth, stink of
uncollected garbage, lack or total absence of social services,
malnutrition and just about everything that makes life
miserable. The urban poor are usually migrants from the
provinces who end up as vendors, scavengers, baggage
boys, hawkers, laundrywomen, shoeshiners, car watchers,
and beggars. For some who are lucky enough to land in
regular jobs, they are the low-income industrial and service
workers.

Other definitions add the lack of education and skills or a high

criminality as characteristic of the urban poor.

From these definitions, the urban poor appear to have nothing in

common but a lack of money. Some are unemployed or work in
the informal sector, while others are factory workers,
schoolteachers, or policemen.19 Many have migrated from the
provinces, but having been born in Manila is certainly no guarantee
against poverty. Whereas the typical educational attainment is said
to be elementary (Ramos-Jimenez et al., 1986, 16), we will show in
chapter 3 that it is rather “some high school,” for there are high
school and even college graduates among the poor. High criminality
as well as a generally miserable quality of life are assertions based
on little empirical evidence. “In short, the urban poor are
heterogeneous, even in any one city” (Nelson 1979, 6). Our study
shows that the urban poor are indeed heterogeneous and diverse
in any one small settlement.

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106 Communication II

To make the remaining common characteristic—low income—the

basis of a definition is of little use as well. There are basically two
ways to lay down the poverty threshold. The relativist approach
defines the poor as the poorest 30 percent (or one-third to one-
half) of the population; discussing how many poor people there
are is obsolete because this ensues trivially from the definition. The
objectivist, more sophisticated approach adds the process of what
are considered “basic needs,” from food and housing to
transportation and education, to an amount that allows a “decent
life.” We need not explain that both methods are definitely arbitrary
and depended on political, rather than analytical, decisions. In
the Philippines the objectivist approach is used, albeit inconsistently:
At times there were ”at least 11 poverty lines or standards
established by as many government and private agencies” (Ramos-
Jimenez et al. 1986, 14).

The “official” poverty threshold in 1992 as declared by the National

Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) was Php5,200
monthly per family for Metro Manila, including Php520 for
housing. The NEDA must have accepted the institution of
squatting for this figure for rent is applicable only in squatter areas.
In fact, many students pay Php800 per month for bedspace in a
decrepit dormitory. The Center for Research and Communication
has devised a more realistic poverty measure called “threshold
family income” (TFI), recognizing the fact that in Metro Manila,
the costs of legitimate housing often exceed the expenditure for
food. Already in 1989 the TFI (high estimate) included Php3,482.90
for housing alone, amounting to a total of Php10,443.53 as “the
level of income that gives the family a minimum of comfort and
human existence” (CRC 1991, 7). A poverty line like this, however,
would render 80 to 90 percent of Manila’s population poor, which
would hardly be politically acceptable.

….

Arbitrariness, however, is not even the weakest point of a threshold

approach. Census-based data on urban poverty are severely
distorted in two ways. First, they systematically underestimate the
poor; and second, figures on income recorded in a census are also
systematically lower than actual ones. We agree with Murphy
(1993, 15) who points out that certain groups are likely to be ex-

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 Unit III Module 6 107

cluded from official surveys. Many urban families were excluded

from the official national census of 1990. Census takers usually
interviewed the owners of squatter house but not the families
renting or sharing houses with the, who comprise abut half of the
squatter population….

That data on income have to be taken with a grain of salt is a

truism among social researchers. Evers and Korff (1986; Evers 1981)
have shown that even in the cities, subsistence production—that
is, productive activities that do not yield cash income but reduce
expenditures—plays an important role in the survival of
households. Moreover, irregular sources of income are unlikely to
be mentioned in formal interviews for one reason or another, not
to mention illegal ones….

The “urban poor” are, consequently, a fluid subject not only for
research bit for practical policies as well. Although poverty is
widespread and visible in Metro Manila, the poor hardly form a
definable segment or “sector” that can be used as a unit of analysis
or a target group for development measures. According to a PCUP
discussion paper (Nario 1990, 1), inconsistent definitions “have
caused the fragmented formulation and implementation of plans
and programs addressed to their needs This situation has not in
any way yielded a long-term impact for the entire urban poor
sector, but had produced only stop-gap solutions.”

A viable way out of these problems of conceptualization is the

common knowledge that the poor live in certain parts of the city
and are hardly ever found in others. Many of the definitions
discussed by Nario (1990) indicate that while urban poverty is not
restricted to the enclaves of slums and “depressed areas” it is heavily
concentrated in these places. In a recent area-based evaluation of
statistical data, Lamberte (1992) estimates the number of people
living in “depressed barangays” or “high-risk urban communities”
in 1990 at some 3.6 million or 47 percent of Metro Manila’s
population. If we take into consideration the growth since then
and the systematic errors of census data mentioned above, we can
say that slum dwellers form a clear majority today.22

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108 Communication II

Although “squatter” is a legal concept, “slum dweller” refers to

physical characteristics of the place of residence, and “urban poor”
in whatever way to the income of residents, the Philippine literature
does not discriminate between the three terms and instead uses
them interchangeably (Ramos-Jimenez et al. 1986, 16). What
appears to be another confusion of concepts makes sense on second
sight: The crucial dividing line in the city separates those who have
legitimate and reasonably secure access to urban land, and those
who do not. Evers (1984, 481) underscores the importance of access
to land:

A precondition for subsisting in an urban environment is

access to the use of urban land to build a house, to put up a
hut, or at lest to find a temporary space for sleeping, eating
and defecating. Property rights regulate this access to urban
land and thereby the chance to subsist, or at least to be
physically present. From this point of view access to urban
land becomes the most basic human need in an urban area.

Aside from the fact that a concept like “urban poor” is not as
straightforward as some might think, the above example shows that an
essay that defines such a concept does so using ways or techniques other
than the formal definition. Dadufalza enumerates these techniques as
follows:

• by synonym
• by origin or semantic history
• by illustration
• by function
• by analysis
• by likeness or similarity
• by analogy or metaphor
• by contrast
• by negation

In an extended definition, several, if not all, of these techniques may be

used.

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 Unit III Module 6 109

Exploring Relationships Between Ideas

A second type of concept paper is the type that explores a relationship
between ideas. The latter is, in fact, what concepts are: abstractions formed
by combining or putting together specific, more concrete ideas. Here is an
example from Alfred McCoy’s Introduction to his book Lives at the Margin:
Biography of Filipinos Obscure, Ordinary, and Heroic (2000):

Biography and History

Biography presents historians with a problem. While it is the most

popular form of history and allows the professional a mass
audience, many historians have reservations about reducing the
complexities of change to the actions of a few individuals, no
matter how powerful or exemplary. Indeed, the modern historian
might well ask: what are we going to do with biography? Antonio
Gramsci, in his writings about ideology and hegemony, offers some
insights into the persistence and importance of biography. “Every
historical act,” he wrote, “presupposes the attainment of a ‘socio-
cultural’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed individual
wills, heterogeneous in their aims, are welded together for the same
goal on the basis of a….common conception of the world.”2 In this
vein, we might argue that biography is primarily a device that
helps organize an individual’s insertion into the ideological and
social formations that define how, as historical subjects, men and
women act or are acted upon.

If we apply this approach, then we can see, perhaps somewhat

schematically, how the “life stories” of epics and ballads insert
and ordinary farmer into the moral order of a community or culture
group; the saint’s life inserts a believer into the Judeo-Christian
order; and, more recently, the heroic biography inserts a citizen
into the “nation” or its subideological formations. If this schema
has merit, then a colonial order based on voluntarism of the rulers
and coercion of the ruled will only produce biographies of the
expatriate elite, not of its colonized subjects, except as auxiliaries
in the narratives of the dominant. To cite one example, the Spanish
biographical register Heroes de Filipinas, published in 1888, included
only two Filipinos among the sixty plus honored for their
contributions to the colonial state. Unlike modern Philippine
histories, which portray the eighteenth-century rebel Diego Silang
as a national hero, this work instead celebrates “the Spanish mestizo
Don Miguel Vicos,” who broke this dangerous revolt by stabbing

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110 Communication II

the “traitor” Silang through his “evil hert.”3 It is nationalism, then,

that is most productive of biographies, as “natives” emerge as
historical agents, autonomous and empowered.

Indeed, the maintenance of the nation requires a canon of model

lives, while at the same time the nation creates the patterns or
structures according to which actual lives are lived. But nations
are also inherently unstable, ambivalent, and contested formations.
These tensions are expressed in shifts in the biographical canon,
debates over heroes, alternative biographies, and, of course, the
persistence of hagiographical writing about national heroes.
Competing ideologies, Gramsci reminds us, “come into
confrontation and conflict, until only one of them tends to
prevail,…to propagate itself throughout society—bringing about
not only a unison of economic and political aims but also intellectual
and moral unity.”4

Philippine biography has a long history. One can go back to oral

tradition—epics, ballads, songs, and other forms that contain, or
purport to be, life stories of figures mythical or historical. Implicated
in such forms are indigenous notions of self, personhood, and
society, raising questions about what constitutes a life, or an
exemplary life, and how this is represented.

The work of anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo has documented this

relationship between social role and narrative biography. In the
1970s, she spent several years with the Ilongot of Nueva Vizcaya
exploring the socialization of young males into a life cycle focused
on ritual head taking as preparation for adulthood and marriage.
In this exploration of self and society, she argued that in most
communities “the reproduction of a given form of social life
demands such continuities in discourse as would permit a shared
and sensible frame for the interpretation of daily practice, so that
the ways that individuals construe their actions show some relation
to the orders that they recognize in the world.”5 To perpetuate the
“communal joy and health” that head taking provides, elder men
teach younger males “the songs and images through
which…Ilongots celebrate the strength of violent youths.”6 As
children, Rosaldo tells us, “young boys learn, and relive in their
play, the headhunting encounters of their elders; they hear songs
that celebrate the distances traversed by raiders;…and from the
‘stories’ toled by seniors learn of slights and insults they will, if
truly ‘angry,’ avenge when they are grown.”7 Indeed, Rosaldo
transcribes several of these ballads, such as the story of the mythic

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 Unit III Module 6 111

Bugegiw’s head taking and marriage, which are essentially model

biographies, that is, the story of a named individual from the past
who accomplished heroic deeds exemplary of Ilongot values.8
Mojares reports that there are up to a thousand such tales in each
Filipino culture, most recounting “heroic deeds by heroes with
magical attributes.”9 As another early example of biography, one
may cite the Muslim tarsila or genealogy. Depending upon the
particular text and its interpretation, this form can be seen as an
example of a biographical text deployed to confirm or validate
claims to status and power.

One can narrow this massive, multifaceted field by focusing on

written or published lives. As the indigenous epic decline from the
seventeenth century onward under the pressures of colonial rule,
the Spanish introduced metrical (verse) romances, hagiography,
and the pasyon, the story of Christ’s crucifixion. According to critic
Nicanor Tiongson, the aim was “to mold Filipinos into perfect
colonials.” Early examples of such colonial forms are lives of saints
and metrical romances (awit and corrido). These are, Mojares tells
us, distinct (one religious, the other secular) but not separate. Both
are, in fact, called vida (bida, Tagalog buhay, Cebuano kinabuhi,
Ilocano biag). Among the many stylistic and thematic interactions
among epics, metrical romances, and saints’ lives that Mojares has
documented, the hagiography was sometimes written by laymen
as a corrido that “presents heroic characters with magical powers,”
much as the pagan myths had done. By the late nineteenth century,
the corrido had moved away from foreign themes “toward the
treatment of local, contemporary and common life,” becoming
thereby a “vehicle for versified history.”10

In this example, biography and history, two separate concepts, are shown
to have a relationship. This relationship is the (third, more abstract) concept
that is being explained or clarified. Note that the relationship between the
two terms is not one of cause and effect or one of similarity or contrast.
The type of relationship between ideas that constitutes the types of concepts
referred to here is complex, even constructed. That is to say, it is not a
“natural” and/or obvious relationship. It is the writer who establishes
the relationship, who makes us “see” or acknowledge it in his/her concept
“paper.”

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112 Communication II

The following topics are likely to be the subject of the kind of concept
paper discussed above:
1. The Politics of Truth (the title of a book by Michelle Barrett, 1991)
2. “Conversion and the Ideology of Submission” (in Vicente Rafael’s
Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog
Society under Early Spanish Rule, 1988)
3. “Colonizing the Cuisine: The Politics of Philippine Foodways” (in
Doreen Fernandez’s Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture, 1994)
4. gender and power
5. democracy and the Internet

Concept papers that explore relationships between concepts or that

construct new concepts out of other concepts are fairly common in
academic discourse. And these are the kinds of concept papers you must
become adept at writing.

Activity 6-2
A. Do one of the following:
1. Locate one of the three published works given as examples
of topics that posit a relationship (i.e., the works of Barrett,
Rafael, and Fernandez) and summarize what the writer
means by the topics.
2. Summarize a published work (may be an essay or article,
or a chapter, or part of a chapter) that is an example of a
concept paper or essay that explores or posits a relationship
between ideas.

B. Do one of the following:

1. Write a 3-5-page concept paper on one of topics 4 and 5
above (i.e., “gender and power” or “democracy and the
Internet”). Read up on your topic of choice, by all means,
and cite relevant sources to prove or clarify your points.
You may decide to narrow down the topic further. That is
part of what a concept paper does. Remember to document
your sources.
2. Write a 3-5-page concept paper on a topic of your own
choice, provided the topic is one that posits a relationship
between at least two ideas. Be guided by the example given
from McCoy (pp. 12-13). You may consult and cite relevant
sources. Remember to document your sources properly.

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Module 7
The Concept Paper II:
Conceptual Frameworks

F rom doing Activity 6-2, you must have ob-

served that in order to establish a
relationship between two essentially separate
Objectives
ideas, you need to consider these ideas from a After studying this module,
particular viewpoint. For the relationship you should be able to:
between them is not one that is inherent to
these ideas; rather, it is constructed, or 1. Describe or characterize
formulated, by the writer him/herself. It is a a conceptual framework;
relationship that is conceptualized by the 2. Identify examples of
writer. conceptual frameworks;
and
This brings us to an important type of concept 3. Write a research
paper, the conceptual framework, in which a proposal, a specific type
writer articulates his/her understanding of of conceptual framework.
certain ideas and how they relate to each other
from a certain point of view. This is the type
of concept paper we will discuss in this module.

What is a Framework?
Having defined the word concept, from which the word conceptual is
derived, let us now define framework. The dictionary tells us that a
framework is a system, structure, or schema. Putting conceptual and
framework together, we have a scheme or structure for interpreting ideas
or concepts.

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 114 Communication II

Academics or scholars are fond of conceptual frameworks or, at least

familiar with them. For it is impossible to conduct a study of a subject
matter, or do an analysis of it, without a conceptual framework.

A conceptual framework lays down the scholar’s definitions of key terms,

assumptions about how these terms are related or make sense together,
and methods and/or approaches used in the study. It clarifies, in short,
where the scholar is coming from, or on what bases his/her conclusions
or findings are anchored. The conceptual framework establishes the
boundaries of a scholarly work and the terms by which it is to be judged.

From the foregoing, it can be deduced that for scholars, knowledge is

constructed and not a self-made object (or something “out there”) that
the scholar finds. Knowledge is a product of thinking. And since we do
not all think the same way, we must tell each other how, as well as what,
we think. The how is just as important as the what, if not more so.

An Example of a Conceptual Framework

Another term for conceptual framework is theoretical framework. A related
term is methodological framework. Here is an example of one. It is an excerpt
of Alice Guillermo’s introductory essay (titled “Reading the Image”) in
her book Image to Meaning (2001).

...Since art is a vital part of our lives, it is important for us to know

and understand it better. Exposure to different kinds of art forms
and the practice of writing on art can lead to the formulation of
purpose of essay: to methods of analyzing it. Thus this introductory essay is an effort
define a semiotic
approach to art
at shaping a method of analysis. It is basically a semiotic approach,
criticism which is able to show how the material and ideational aspects are
closely interlinked, if not fused, in the work of art. Likewise, this
simple semiotic approach goes beyond the formalist view which
limits itself to the formal premises of the work; rather, it advances
a broader aesthetics in which the work is situated within the
coordinates of society and history in a dynamic relationship of
engagement.

.... II

Let us begin with the basic premise that there are two interrelated
basic premise or aspects in the study of art. The first is that art has its specificity,
assumption of
that is, its particular language or vocabulary that has to do with
author’s approach
to art criticism the media, techniques, and visual elements of art and that consti-

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tute it as a distinct area of human knowledge and signifying prac-

tice. This is not just what is commonly called the formal aspect of
art, but it is what constitutes art as a particular human activity
different from the others. The other aspect is that art, while it has
its specificity, is at the same time historically situated and shaped
by social, economic, and political forces. Both these aspects need
to be taken into account to be able to fully understand and
appreciate art. For a study of the formal elements alone will not
lead to a full understanding of the work, in the same way that the
exclusive study of the social determinants risks collapsing the artistic
into the sociological. A visual work as an iconic or pictorial sign
has a unique and highly nuanced meaning, and this uniqueness
and semantic richness arise from the original use of the elements
and resources of art. Needless to say, the meaning, signification,
or system of significations of a work is not statemental, nor is the
understanding of a work a reductive process that reduces meaning
to a summary, statement, or single insight or message. Meaning in
art is a complex of intellectual, emotional, and sensory significations,
which the work conveys and to which the viewer responds, definition of
bringing in the breadth of his cultural background, artistic exposure meaning in art
and training, and human experience in a dialogic relationship with
the artwork. One may speak of a work’s “horizon of meaning”
(Eagleton 1991), implying a range of possible significations that a
work may accommodate, at the same time that it suggests semantic
parameters.

The analytic study of the various elements and material features

of the work should lead to a more stable and consensual field of
meaning, away from erratic, whimsical, purely subjective, and
impressionistic readings.

III components
of author’s
Having taken note of the information provided by the basic semiotic
documentation of the work, we then proceed to the four planes of approach to
art criticism
analysis: the basic semiotic, the iconic, the contextual, and the
evaluative planes.

The Basic Semiotic Plane

Semiotics here is used in its basic formulation for the study of

the first
“signs.” Here the work of art is the iconic or pictorial sign. A sign
component or
consists of a “signifier,” or its material/physical aspect, and its plane of
“signified,” or nonmaterial aspect, as concept and value. Related analysis:
to these is the “referent,” or object as it exists in the real world. A basic semiotic

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visual work, whether it be a two-dimensional pictorial plane or a

three-dimensional body, is an embodiment of signs in which all
physical or material marks and traces, elements, figures, and
notations, are signifiers that bear a semantic or meaning-conveying
potential and which, in relation to each other, convey concepts
and values which are their signifieds. Their semantic potential is
realized in the analysis or reading of the integral work.

The basic semiotic plane covers the elements and the general
technical and physical aspects of the work with their semantic
meaning-conveying potential. It includes (1) visual elements, (2)
choice of medium and technique, (3) format of the work and (4)
other physical properties and marks.

....

The elements of the visual arts derive their semantic, or meaning-

conveying potential, from two large sources, namely, (1) human
two sources of
psychophysical experiences (psychological and physical/sensory),
meaning of which are commonly shared; and (2) the sociocultural convention
physical s of a particular society and period (Matejka and Titunik 1976). As
aspects of human beings, our sensory and physical experiences in general
artwork are intimately fused with our psychological conditions and
processes. Among our basic psychophysical experiences involve
those of the changing light of day and night, of warmth and cold,
of weight or gravity, relative distance, pleasure and pain, with the
complex intellectual and emotional associations that go with these.
Because of these humanly shared experiences, it is often possible
to arrive at a general agreement of what these elements and their
usage convey in a work of art.

The semantic potential of line, for instance, does not merely lie in
example of its orientation as horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or curvilinear, but
basic semiotic also in its very quality, its thickness or thinness, density and
analysis of porosity, regularity or irregularity, its production by even or uneven
artwork in pressure on a surface, as well as qualities determined by the
which meaning
is derived from
instrument producing it. A line made by a technical pen signifies a
psychophysical set of concepts and values different from that made by a stick of
experience charcoal. Likewise, the different orientations of line derive their
meaning from the positions of the body. Asleep or at rest, one is in
a horizontal position; in readiness, vertical; and in action, diagonal.
In dance, one creates curved lines in space with one’s body and
limbs.

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Our sense of tonal values from light through shades of gray to

dark comes from our experience of the cycle of night and day,
from early dawn through the gradual series of light changes in the
course of the day until evening to darkest night. These changes in
the light and dark of our environment have always affected us
psychologically; in general, dawn ushers in bright optimism, while
night creates a sense of mystery, melancholy, and respite. In our
perception of color around us, warm hues that seem to advance
are associated with human warmth, congeniality, openness, and more examples/
spontaneity, while cool hues that seem to recede are associated specific
with remoteness, self-containment, quietness, and restraint. Shapes applications of
basic semiotic
are also linked to our physical experiences. Geometric shapes,
analysis
whether two- or three-dimensional, are measurable and
circumscribed. Organic shapes are drawn from natural living and
growing forms, while free shapes project, expand, and contract in
all directions. Texture is associated with experiences of pleasure
and pain, pleasantness and unpleasantness, in tactile sensations
of hard and soft, smooth and rough, silky and gritty. Movement in
the visual art, whether implied or actual, parallels human
experiences of movement with our own bodies or in relation to
things around us. Rhythm is part of the body’s processes as an
organic whole. Our sense of composition is affected by gravity and
the relative weights of things, as well as our physical experience of
bodies massing, crowding, or in isolation and apartness. It is also
determined by our sense of the relationship between figures or
objects, as well as between figures or objects and their ground, as
well as the intervallic spaces within a given design or field. While
allowing for a range of differences in sense perception due to
geography and climate (tropical or temperate), it is possible to
assume a certain degree of universality in the human response to
the elements of art.

Just as important, the meaning-conveying potential of the elements

also comes from their sociocultural context with its conventions
and traditions. Social conventions involve social codes and symbolic
systems commonly shared by members of a society or group.
Codifying systems include those of color, for instance, where apart
from the significations drawn from the basic psychophysical
example of basic
associations, they acquire socially derived meanings. For the various
semiotic analysis
hues possess differential semantic inflections in different societies. in which meaning
A common example is black, which is the color of mourning in is derived from the
Western or Western-influenced societies, while it is white in many sociocultural
Asian societies. Likewise, groups and societies have their own context of artistic
elements
chromatic codes that have to do with the range of hues with their

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tones and saturations that operate in their art with prevalent or

favored color combinations. For instance, the chromatic code used
by artists in urban areas has been largely determined by the
standard sets of colors industrially produces in the West. On the
other hand, the chromatic codes of the cultural communities are
determined by their lore of local dyes derived from available plants
and minerals. Each cultural community has its own particular
chromatic code because it has its own lore of dyes, although there
may be general similarities between a number of communities. By
bringing out the distinctiveness of each, one does not lump
indigenous artistic qualities into one homogenous category.

....

According to de Saussure (1974), meaning is produced from the

interplay of the signifiers of the work. Following this, a number of
observations arise. The first is that artistic analysis takes into
account not only the elements but also other material aspects, such
as dimension, format, medium, frame, and techniques, as signifiers
or conveyors of meaning. The second is that there is developed a
finer and more sensitive perception of the elements as they are
specifically and materially found in a particular work. Line, for
instance, is not just seen in its vertical, horizontal, or diagonal
orientation, but is examined in its particular properties of density,
porosity, relative sharpness, and other such matters. Third, the
elements are not studied in a sequential and compartmentalized
manner but in a highly relational and interactive way in which
the use of line, color, texture, and composition in space confirms
or verifies meanings or creates semantic relationships of similarity
or contrast. And fourth, the signifiers go hand in hand with their
signifieds, and thus one does not limit oneself to a description of
the elements in the way they are used; one, instead, links their
particularities of usage with their primary significations based on
human psychophysical experiences, as well as with their intellectual
and emotional associations within the society. In the images of art
and the media, the use of the elements affects us subliminally or
unconsciously and, especially in the media, is part of what have
been called the “hidden persuaders” that influence choice and
behavior. However, it is in art criticism that we become highly
difference conscious of the means and their effects and what they signify. It
between
semiotic is also in semiotic analysis that we work within the specific language
analysis and of art. In contrast, the classical approach often overlooks the basic
classical language of art and bears heavily on the image, its iconography
approach to art and descriptive details, as well as its iconology and its narratives.

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The Iconic Plane, or the Image Itself

This level is still part of the semiotic approach since it is still based
on the signifier-signified relationship. Here, however, it is not the
material elements of the work that are dealt with as in the basic
semiotic plane; it has to do with the particular features, aspects,
and qualities of the image, which are the second-level signifiers. the second
The image is regarded as an “iconic sign,” which means—beyond component or
its narrow association with religious images in the Byzantine plane of analysis
style—that it is a unique sign with a unique, particular, and highly the iconic plane
nuanced meaning, as different from a conventional sign, such as a
traffic or street sign that has a single literal meaning agreed upon
by social convention.

The iconic plane includes the choice of the subject, which may
bear social and political implications. An example in art history is
one component
the French realist artist Gustave Courbet’s choice of workers and of iconic plane:
ordinary people in his paintings, instead of the Olympian gods the choice of
and goddesses or heroes from Greek and Roman antiquity that subject
were the staple of classical and academic art up to the nineteenth
century. We can ask the questions: Is the subject meaningful in
terms of the sociocultural context? Does it reflect or have a bearing
on the values and ideologies arising in a particular place and time?

One proceeds to consider the presentation of the image and its

relationship to the viewer. If the subject is a human figure, does it
address the viewer directly or is it self-contained or self-absorbed? second
What kind of subject-viewer relationship is implied by the subject component of
through his facial expression, body language, costume and iconic plane:
accessories, natural or social background? Is it a relationship of subject-viewer
peers or one of dominance and subordination? is it a friendly, relationship
ironic, aggressive, or hostile relationship, and all possible nuances
thereof? Most examples of Philippine genre, for instance, are based
on the concept of the stage or tableau that is oriented toward a
large public audience, which it seems to address directly—a mark
f the social cohesiveness of rural peasant society as well as of the
extended Filipino family system in which all members of society
have their kinship appellations. John Berger, in his Ways of Seeing
(1972), has an engrossing study of paintings, with the female nude
as subject, in which he demonstrates sexist attitudes toward women
from the implied male viewer.

Also part of the iconic plane is the positioning of the figure or

figures, whether frontal, in profile, three-fourths, and so fourth,
and the significations that arise from these different presentations.

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Does the painting show strong central focusing with the principal
third
component of
figure occupying the center space, or is it decentered and the
iconic plane: painting asymmetrical in composition? How doe these
positioning of presentations contribute to different meanings? Does the subject
figures or subjects have a formal or a casual air? How does one describe
the central figure’s stance: poised, relaxed, indifferent, provocative,
or aloof? How much importance is given to psychological insight
into character by the artist? To costume and accessories? To the
setting—natural, social, or domestic? What is the relative scaling
of the figures from large to small? What bearing does this have on
the meaning of the work? Luna’s Tampuhan (1895) brings to the
fore the artist’s sensitivity to body language. How do the postures
of the man and the woman convey their emotional attitudes?

....

The style of figuration is an important part of the iconic plane. The

figurative style is not mere caprice, passing fashion, or the artist’s
fourth personal ecriture; beyond these, it implies a particular re-
component:
style of
presentation or interpretation of the world, a world view, if not
figuration ideology. Classical figuration basically follows the proportion of 7
½ to 8 heads to the entire figure in its pursuit of ideal form, as in a
formal studio portrait with the subject enhanced by makeup, all
imperfections concealed. Realist figuration is based on the keen
observation of people, nature, and society in the concern for truth
of representation, thus creating portraits of individuals without
glossing over physical imperfections and defects or exposing the
environmental squalor that arises from social inequities.
Impressionist figuration is fluid and informal, often catching the
subject unaware like a candid camera. Expressionist figuration
follows emotional impulses and drives, thus often involving
distortion and clashing colors that come from strong emotion. The
viewer, however, should not be too anxious to find precise stylistic
labels, for contemporary art has seen the development of highly
original styles that have gone far beyond the turn-of-the-century
styles of the School of Paris. It is important to be sensitive to the
meaning-conveying potential of highly individual and
contemporary styles. In the basic semiotic plane, which deals with
the material aspects of the work, and in the iconic plane, which
deals with the aspects of the image itself, one can see that as the
signifier cannot be separated from the signified, concrete fact or
material data cannot be divorced from value; in other words, as
Janet Wolff (1983) asserts, fact is value laden and value, or
ideological meaning, is derived from material fact.

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The Contextual Plane

...Resituating the work in its context will bring out the full meaning
of the work in terms of its human and social implications. The
viewer draw out the dialogic relationship of art and society. Art
the third plane
sources its energy and vitality from its social context and returns
of analysis: the
to it as a cognitive force and catalyst for change. If one does not contextual
view the work in relation to its context—but chooses to confine plane
analysis to the internal structure of the work—one truncates its
meaning by refusing to follow the trajectories of the work into the
larger reality that has produced it. One precludes the work from
reverberating in the real world.

...Art involves cognition or learning; it is an important way of

learning about people, life, and society. Does the work expand our
knowledge of reality as a whole? Is its experience insightful and
transformative with respect to living in the world?

A broad knowledge of a society’s history and its economic, political,

and cultural conditions, past and present, is called upon in the
contextual plane. With this comes a knowledge of national and
world art and literature mythologies, philosophies, and different requirement of
cultures and world views. The work of art many contain references contextual
analysis: broad
and allusions, direct or indirect, to historical figures and events, as
knowledge of
well as to religious, literary, and philosophical ideas and values history and
that are part of the meaning of the work. economic,
political and
The different symbolic systems, which are culture-bound, also come cultural
conditions
into play. Although we have been strongly influenced by Western
symbolic systems, we have to move toward a greater awareness of
our many indigenous and Asian/Southeast Asian, Malay animist,
and Islamic symbolic systems that must be valorized as they are
part of our social context. These systems may have to do with color,
shape, design, as well as cultural symbols associated with the belief
systems of the different ethnic groups. Figures may also have rich
and distinct intellectual and emotional associations built around
them in the curse of the history of a group.

The contextual plane likewise situates the work in the personal

and social circumstances of its production. The work may contain
allusions to personal or public events, conditions, stages, as well as
influences (such as persons and literary texts) that have been
particularly meaningful to the artist. Themes and subthemes may
be derived from personal life experiences significant to the artist

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and particular biographical data may play an important part in

understanding the work and its view of reality.

The work is firmly situated in a particular society and time, “in its
social and historical coordinates” (Wolff 1983). The work is viewed
or studied in relation to its epoch, to the prevailing world views,
ideologies, issues, concerns, trends, and events of the day. It situates
the artist with respect to the debates of his time. The work may
have allusions or references to the personalities and events of a
particular period, and convey attitudes of espousal, approval,
indifference, or rejection with respect to these for the work of art
conveys values, artistic, religious, social, or political. Art then is
not value-free. All art contains values of one kind or another.
Abstract art, likewise, may express world views and values, as
Mondrian’s abstraction, for instance, conveyed his neoplatonism,
as he considered his paintings symbolic of the underlying harmony
and order in the universe. On the contrary, Pollock’s gestural
abstraction places value on spontaneity and the release of kinetic
energy and nonrational impulses. Values—such as spontaneity as
against discipline and order, mystery and elusiveness as against
clear definition, informality as against the formal, transitoriness as
against permanence—may be found in abstract art, at the same
time that these can be viewed in the light of the intellectual trends
of the time.

also
Finally, a single work of art is often more completely understood
considered: the when it is viewed in the context of the artist’s entire body of work,
place of artwork when it is juxtaposed and compared on the semiotic, iconic, and
in artist’s body contextual planes with works of artists in the same period, in
of works
different periods of his career, and then with the work of his
contemporaries. This is because the meaning of one work may
become part of a larger body of work or of an integral artistic vision.
In comparative intertextuality, the work of art reveals its numerous
ramifications of meaning, at the same time that it is related to its
referents in the real world.

The Evaluative Plane

The evaluative plane has to do with analyzing the values of a work.

fourth plane of After the understanding of the work is the difficult task of
analysis: evaluating it. ...The first consideration in evaluation would be to
evaluative what degree the material basis of the work conveys meaning or
plane particular intellectual/emotional contents.

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The evaluation of the material basis of the work reckons with

standards of excellence in the use of the medium and its related
techniques. Some questions may be posed. Is the medium (which
considers
includes surface, ground, or material block, instruments, tools, standards
pigments—all these calling for appropriate techniques) used with
a high degree of artistic skill, creativity, and insight? Was the
particular medium chosen as most appropriate in conveying
general or specific significations? With respect to medium, the
viewer/critic rejects the traditional hierarchies laid down by the
nineteenth-century academies in which oil on canvas and sculpture
in marble were considered superior to other media. For all visual
forms—whether paintings, prints, posters, illustrations, cartoons,
and comics—observe standards of technical excellence to which a
work may be on par or below par. Understanding and evaluating
the technical side of the work requires a familiarity with the
sensitivity to the properties of medium. Thus the viewer/critic
should devote time to researching on and observing art making,
even doing exercises or producing his or her own work. At the
same time, one must be open to the transgressing of conventional
processes and norms in the quest for new creative and expressive
resources.

The traditional and usual consideration of form touches upon the

principles or organization, which are traditionally identified as
rhythm, harmony, balance, and proportion. One has to bear in
mind, however, that these tenets were laid down by the European
classical academies to preserve the hierarchic order of monarchical
society. In their philosophical framework the ideals of harmony,
balance, and proportion were not only aesthetic values but also
sociopolitical values decreed as “in the nature of things.” The
problem is that these values, while they retain a continuing but
limited validity, are often erroneously absolutized as the ultimate
objectives of art.

It becomes clear that, on one hand, the artist is not or should not
be a mere technician but expresses a view of life in his work. On
the other hand, the viewer/critic is also not a mere connoisseur
confined to the analysis of the elements, techniques, and processes.
why the critic
The viewer/critic is one who must have, after long reflection and
evaluates: the
experience, arrived at the formulation of his own value system, his critic’s role in
view of the world and humanity he has come to feel deeply and society
even strongly about. As the artist enjoys artistic independence, the
critic/viewer also enjoys his own autonomy. For, to be sure, the
critic is not an appendage of he artist or a promoter or publicist,

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but one who vitally contributes to the dynamic dialogue, interaction,

and debate in the field of art and culture as these intersect with
other human concerns—the political, social, economic.

An underlying premise then is that the viewer of art in particular

the art critic, needs to have thought out fully his own values by
which he or she lives as a total human person. The artist likewise
creates art not as a fragmented human being or purely technical
specialist, but as a total human person. The artist likewise creates
art not as a fragmented human being or purely technical specialist,
but as a total thinking and feeling individual. If the critic simply
describes and appreciates the work’s technical excellence, if it is
indeed worth appreciating on this level, and stops short of making
value judgements, then he isolates the work from its larger social
environment—in which case, he divorces art from life and its
concerns and promotes the condition of art feeding upon itself.
Yet, when the critic evaluates the work relative to his own
philosophy and vision of life and the world, he is only fully realizing
the dialogue between the work and the viewer, after completing
the process of semiotic reading, understanding, and contextualizing
the work.

Since art directly or indirectly conveys meaning and seeks to

influence one’s ideas and values in subliminal ways, then it is but
an essential role of the viewer/critic to be able to recognize thee
subtle semiotic devices and to articulate these and bring them to
the light. As the critic/viewer fully recognizes and respect the
relationship prerogative of the artist to express his ideas and feelings, the former
between critic also reserves the right to agree or have reservations with respect to
and artist
the work in relation to his own values and view of the world. It is
to be pointed out, however, that it is possible for a critic to
understand and appreciate a work viewed in its specific
sociocultural context without necessarily espousing its ideas, in
the same way that one can deeply appreciate a Zen work of art
without being a Zen Buddhist oneself. However, in contemporary
art produced in the context of our time and place, the expression
of the critic’s differential view is not to be construed as a
manipulative strategy but as only bringing out alternative
viewpoints in the dialogic relationship of art and viewer, art and
reality.

Indeed, the responsible viewer/critic draws from a rich fund of

knowledge and humanism. The Filipino art critic may uphold
values reflecting the quest for national identity and placing

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premium on the people’s interests vis-à-vis foreign interests that

seek to dominate our national life. The democratization of art may
be promoted in themes that enhance the sense of human dignity
especially of those engaged in basic production and that espouse
liberative causes and projects. Democratization can also be carried
out in the use of popular forms and media that make art accessible
to the larger number. There is, likewise, a liberative thrust in themes
that espouse the cause of traditional marginalized sectors, such as
women and children, as well as non-Christian ethnic and Muslim
groups in the Philippines. The critic may uphold the role of art as
an emancipating influence rather than as pure commodity or
decoration catering to the elite.
differences
Yet what if, as may sometimes be the case, interpretations of the in critical
work by different critics do not coincide or are contradictory? Does interpretation
this mean then that our critical process is unreliable? There may
be a general consensus on the basic semiotic and iconic planes, but
differences may lie in the contextual and, especially, in the
evaluative plane of analysis. This is so in all class societies riven by
conflicting interests, such as ours; it is only to be expected that
artists and viewers/critics adhere to diverse value systems that
coincide, overlap, or are in opposition, thus affecting the way they
make art or look at art.

Thus, after the critic/viewer has gone through the four planes—
the semiotic, the iconic, the contextual, and the evaluative—it is
possible to determine the semantic focus and parameters of the
work and from these project its horizons of meaning, its boundaries
and limitations, its semantic implications and ideological conclusion:
the dialogic
orientations, its conservative or transformative tendencies with nature of
respect to human life and society. The critic/viewer thus arrives at art
a more focused understanding of the work of art which, while it
has a semantic core, has parameters that are fluid and continually
being expanded and elaborated on in the ever-continuing dialogic
experience of art.

The above example shows the basic elements of a conceptual framework—

definitions, assumptions, methodologies. Notice that while the overall
concept being clarified is the semiotic approach to art criticism, this “big”
concept in turn consists of other concepts (i.e., the four planes of analysis).
These sub-concepts in turn consist of other concepts which Guillermo, the
writer, defines and exemplifies or illustrates. Thus, this essay illustrates
the highly abstract character of conceptual frameworks.

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Although Guillermo makes few direct references to the theories on which

her approach to interpreting art is based, it is clear that her approach is
the product of extensive reading and study. Her training in the discipline
of art studies and her vast experience as an art critic is distilled in her
conceptual framework of what art is and how art is best studied.

A Second Example
Different disciplines look at the same phenomenon or object of study
differently. This is another reason why academics consider conceptual
frameworks important. It tells the reader where the writer is coming from,
or through what disciplinal lens he/she is looking at something.

In the sample conceptual framework we will consider in this section—

“Corruption: A Framework” by Emmanuel de Dios (in Public Policy III: 4,
1998)—we shall see how a fairly familiar concept, corruption, is viewed
from a particular disciplinal perspective, that of Economics. The experience
of reading this essay is one of defamiliarization—that is, the concept seems
no longer familiar, as we see it from a different point of view. The
experience is also one that should make us appreciate the following:

• Meanings are not inherent in objects or terms;

• We all look at something from a particular point of view (or frame of
reference)—whether we know it or not;
• There is value in knowing the points of view of others;
• Our points of view are not personal to us, but are products of our
training and experience; and
• A point of view is complex, based on many individual ideas and
streams of ideas; and some points of view are more complex than
others.

Also, different points of view need not be contradictory. Relatedly, it is

possible to arrive at consistent, if not equivalent, conclusions about
something following radically different methodologies or approaches.

Read the example carefully. I have made some marginal notes that call
attention to certain rhetorical features of the essay.

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Corruption: A Framework
By Emmanuel S de Dios

Defining Corruption

There is no single definition of corruption. An earlier literature

(e.g., Cariño 1986) presupposed legal norms and defined the matter
primarily in terms of behavior that deviated from such norms.
Posing the question this way, the main focus of attention becomes
one of asking why there was a deviation between value systems,
for example, between what people did and what the law required.
This had the disadvantage, however, of leaving unanswered the limitation of
whether and to what extent the observance of either moral or legal the legal
norms produced useful social outcomes.1 Much earlier, in The Wealth definition of
corruption
of Nations (Book 5, Chapter 2, Article 4), Adam Smith raised
precisely this dilemma regarding the rationality of legal norms
themselves when he described the smuggler in sympathetic moral
terms as

a person who, though no doubt blamable for violating the

laws of his country, is frequently incapable of violating those
of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect,
an excellent citizen had not the laws of his country made
that a crime which nature never meant to be so.

More recently, economists have refocused attention on the

economic effects of corruption by focusing on the economic nature
of the transactions involved in corruption and recognizing it as an introduction to
exchange motivated by self-interest. Shleifer and Vishny (1993) the economic
view of
have defined corruption simply as ‘the sale by government officials
corruption
of government property for personal gain.’ This definition may be
broadened further to take into account nonpecuniary exchange
not involving outright sale. Hence, Nye has proposed that
corruption refer to ‘behavior which deviates from the formal duties
of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close, family,
private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against
the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence.’

Corruption and monopoly

one aspect of
Often corruption is presumed to be government’s exclusive position: the economic
in virtually all important transactions involving corruption, concept of
government is the sole—or at least an important—procurer or corruption: its
relation to
provider.... monopoly

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The reasons that government is in this position are bound up with

the very role of government itself. These may derive from efficiency
considerations, such as the provision of public goods, the
idiosyncratic nature of many government transactions, or the simple
position of government as tax collector. Whatever its source,
however, exclusivity confers monopolistic power upon government,
which standard theory tells us, provides the occasion for rents to
be earned.2

How government should behave with respect to such potential

rents depends on the purpose of governance. In the case of
procurement, it is obviously in the government’s interest to
maximize the rents it can earn from its monopsony position, since
the exercise of this power leads to a lower cost of provision of
public goods and services. On the other hand, if government is in
the role of sole provider, it is generally not its purpose to exercise
its full monopoly power. Think of what would occur, for example,
if the government’s aim were to sell applications for business permits
for what the market would bear, or if, as in earlier times, judicial
decisions were to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Problems arise if the disposition of these potential rents does not

accord with the purposes of government, and it is at just this point
that corruption becomes possible. Hence, for example, if a
specific procurement contract is rigged to favor a party that is not the most
allusion to cost-efficient supplier, then clearly some of the rents that ought to
how have accrued to government were captured by others, namely,
monopoly the corrupt official and the private contractor, so that the imperative
leads to
corruption
of maximizing the monopsony rents is not obeyed. Analogously, if
the public purpose is best served by refraining from maximizing
the government’s rent as a sole provider, then clearly the purpose
would not be served if the dispenser of the service chose to exercise
the monopoly wholly or in part, and pocketed the resulting rents.

From an economic viewpoint, therefore, it seems proper to define

corruption as the private disposal of potential rents due to
government. This is broad enough to include instances when rents
definition of
corruption vis-
that
a-vis ought to be collected are not, or when rents that are to be given
monopoly away are not. In all events, however, corruption is associated with
rents, and rents with the government’s exclusive or monopoly
position.

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Corruption as a principal-agent problem

This definition has the benefit of being general enough to require

no explicit reference to legal norms. It is also an economic definition
that is a clear invitation to cast the problem of corruption in the
mold of the well-known principal-agent (henceforth, PA) problem
in economies (see, for example, Arrow 1986). The PA problem
refers to a situation where one party (the ‘agent’) is contracted to
promote an outcome in behalf of someone else, namely, the
‘principal.’ The agent’s action, however, potentially affects not only concretizing
the principal’s action but also his own interest. When the agent’s the theoretical
action cannot be directly observed by the principal, or where the discussions
of P-A:
outcome is affected not only by the agent’s action, the problem government
arises for the principal of how to ensure that the agent takes the as principal;
appropriate action to promote the principal’s interest. In the case agent as
of corruption, the principal is the government and its aim is to bureaucrats
and politicians
distribute the rents accruing to it in a certain manner. This function,
however, is devolved to bureaucrats and politicians (or to private
individuals such as concessionaires) who may act in their own
interest. Because the agent’s action is only imperfectly observed,
the government cannot always be sure that its agents are always
acting in its behalf.

The PA problem proper is one of designing a mechanism (say, in

the form of a fee or compensation-schedule) that elicits the one reason
appropriate voluntary response from agents that yields the best why agents of
government
result from the principal’s view.3 Put this way, it becomes curious
are not
that of the many types of fee schedules, most current systems of discouraged
government rely on only one, namely, the wage-employment from corrupt
relationship, according to which bureaucrats (and politicians) are practices: the
in effect paid a straight fee to secure their participation,4 possibly giving of fixed
wages or
with corresponding (dire) punishments for failure to deliver. salaries to
agents
It has since become well known in the PA literature that such a regardless of
fee-scheme works only if output is directly observable, or the agent’s output
actions can be monitored, or both the principal and the agent are
neutral with respect to risk. Otherwise, the scheme is liable to lead
either to shirking (if neither output nor input are easily observed),
or imposes on the agent an undue share of the risk (if the agent is
in fact risk-averse). To insist on making this mechanism work in
all cases implies large investments in monitoring, which become
evident with the increasing costs associated with the establishment
and operation of various audit, investigation and prosecution
bodies, as well as costs of court litigation. Furthermore, the more
difficult and unlikely detection is, the harsher the punishments

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need to be,5 leading to undue risks being borne by the agent. This
may reach absurd proportions, such as when the death penalty or
life imprisonment is imposed on even petty bureaucratic crimes,
leading to questions regarding the credibility of such threats. Finally,
the possibility must also be raised that even the fixed-fee implied
in this scheme is not at a level sufficient to fulfill the participation
constraint, a circumstance that highlights the low level of
compensation of bureaucrats.

The main message of the PA approach is to point to the possibility

and appropriateness of other mechanisms. For example, some
variety of linear-free schemes, similar to share tenancy, may both
distribute risk and maintain incentives for performance by basing
payment on observable indices of performance. A version of this
has actually been attempted in the fee-sharing arrangement
between the Metro Manila Development Authority and their agents
(traffic enforcers and traffic towing). Another broad possibility is
a fee-scheme where it is the agent that pays a fixed fee to the
principal. Under this arrangement, high powered incentives exist
for the agent to perform, since it is the residual claimant, although
the arrangement presumes a capacity for risk-bearing. Recent
examples of these include the privatization of the provision of
certain public services that generate revenue, such as resorting to
private concessionaires in the case of metropolitan water and
sewerage or, much earlier, the ‘tax farms’ France under Colbert.
Where no revenues or appropriable rents are involved, sequential
contracting is a close alternative to direct provision by paid
employees, under which the principal (here, the government) pays
the contractor a fixed fee, with the difference that the tenure or
the stability of employment is not guaranteed. Here the incentive
problem is solved by more explicit competition in a pool of potential
agents. None of these alternatives is perfect: schemes with higher-
powered performance incentives may cause agents to perform
overzealously with adverse consequences for the constituencies to
be served (e.g., bounty-hunting and false accusations). However,
it must be recognized that practice and experiment have lagged
far behind theory in this respect.

Corruption as tax or transfer

An early and somewhat surprising recognition of corruption in

the economics literature says that the corruption label by itself—
i.e., without further qualification—says nothing about efficiency.
In essence, corruption is a transfer, from the government—or its

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intended beneficiaries—to the private parties involved in one economic

corruption. This is not to say that corruption has no economic view of
corruption: it
impact: in diverting the benefits from the government or its does not affect
beneficiaries to private interests, corruption undoubtedly frustrates economic
society’s goals of distributional equity. (Some of these effects are efficiency
discussed further below.) Without further qualification, however,
it cannot be said to affect economic efficiency.

Indeed, subject to some important distinctions to be discussed,

corruption is similar to a tax or fine (more exactly a tax-cum-
transfer) from the viewpoint of those affected by it. This is easily
seen in the erring drivers but who demand immediate payoffs for
themselves rather than remitting these to the government. Whether corruption
in fact the officer remits the money to the government is a matter works like a
of indifference in the substantive efficiency imperative of tax
discouraging errant driving behavior. From this aspect, therefore,
the effect of corruption is identical to that of a tax. Indeed, some
earlier authors (e.g., Leff 1964) argued that corruption might
indeed serve the purpose of facilitating transactions by
(automatically as it were) underwriting efficiency wages for poorly
paid government employees.

However, while this observation that corruption is similar to

taxation is insightful, it is partial at best. There area in fact several differences
between
differences between taxes and corruption in their effects on
corruption and
efficiency. First, to the extent that taxes are deemed to induce taxes:
socially desirable behavior—for example, in terms of correcting difference # 1
externalities or providing for the optimal provision of public goods—
a bribe to evade a tax or a fine necessarily dilutes the effect. This is
because a bribe must always be less than the tax or fine it is meant
to avoid.

A second difference is that not all corruption has the

characteristic—which may be presumed about taxes—of seeking
to address externalities or inequities. It is necessary to distinguish difference # 2
between rule-reinforcing and rule-undermining corruption.6 The
case of corrupt traffic rule enforcers is a clear example of the former.7
At the other end, corruption may weaken or undermine rules, such
as when bidding rules are rigged to favor certain agents. Similarly,
in the matter of pubic goods provision, it is obvious that a corrupt
society will have less public goods than a society that collects taxes.
It is clear that both societies will have unequal levels of efficiency,
depending on how one perceives the desirable levels of spending
between public and private goods.8

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A third major difference between corruption and taxation has to

do with certainty. Taxes and fines approach the competitive price
mechanism in terms of their transparency and predictability. Bribes,
on the other hand, are notoriously difficult to track and to predict.
difference # 3
An important circumstance related to uncertainty is that most
corruption-prone goods are idiosyncratic and therefore prone to
monopolistic provision. The typical ‘small numbers’ problem
involved presents an obstacle to arriving at any sort of ‘equilibrium’
brine, especially for deals that are large but few and far between.
(This difference is noticeably less in petty bureaucratic corruption
in front-line offices where contact with large numbers of people
permits a ‘going price’ for grease money to be set.) The wider range
of possible levels for bribes constitutes a greater uncertainty and
may have efficiency effects through a discouragement of investment
parametric vs. (see, for example, Campos, Lien and Pradhan 1997). From this
variable aspect, it may be possible to distinguish between parametric
corruption: the corruption, which approaches taxation, and variable corruption,
former is like which is associated with greater uncertainty. Obviously the costs
taxation
of parametric corruption would be less than those of variable
corruption.

Finally, Shleifer and Vishny (1993) point to secrecy as a crucial

difference between corruption and taxes. The appropriability of
corruption—and not-taxes—may so distort the incentives of
difference # 4 bureaucrats and politicians that they artificially divert activities
into areas that permit more corruption, and away from those in
which there is less. The choice of pork-barrel projects, for example,
could be directed not primarily by social benefit-cost considerations
but by the ease with which bribes maybe ‘earned’, say through
acquaintance with particular contractors.

....

Economists’ view of corruption

The way economists think about corruption will seem strange to

calling attention
to how many people, especially to those who are accustomed to viewing
unconventional the matter primarily as a moral question. Corruption after all may
the economic be regarded as theft, plain and simple, and is therefore categorically
view of objectionable without further qualification. If this were the case, a
corruption is;
differences
discussion of the ‘economic effects’ of corruption would be futile,
between since whether or not these effects were benign or pernicious would
conventional be irrelevant to one’s judgement, which is that corruption is never
view and and nowhere to be tolerated.
economic view
of corruption

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It therefore comes as a surprise for some to hear reputable

economists express the somewhat agnostic view that ‘the theoretical
effect of corruption is unclear; in some cases, the economy would
operate more efficiently if governmental rules can be readily
overcome by cash payments’ (Barro and Sala-I Martin 1995). Such
statements seem to leave room for the possibility that corruption
may not be so bad and perhaps may even be desirable in certain
circumstances. An early example of this, already cited, was the
agnostic view of mainstream economists since Adam Smith
regarding smuggling. From the general viewpoint that self-imposed
trade barriers are inimical to a country’s interests, economists
regarded the circumvention of such barriers, including smuggling
and corruption, as welfare-improving.

It also surprises many that in assessing the effects of corruption,

economists worry less about the size of the payoffs involved and
more about the manner by which they occur and how they affect
other people’s behavior. This is in contrast to the lay person’s view
of the matter, which regards it as self-evident that larger payoffs
imply larger consequences. In other words, economists think size
is less important than technique.

Cross-Country Studies

Several empirical studies in recent years (e.g., Barro 1991, Barro

and Sala-I Martin 1995, Mauro 1995, Mauro 1997 [cited in Rose-
Ackerman 1997], Keefer and Knack 1995) have sought to measure
whether and how much corruption affects overall economic
performance. In the typical study, some index of corruption is first
devised. This is imperfect, since it typically relies on judgement
among business people or business consultancy groups of how
frequently corruption was required in business consultancy groups
of how frequently corruption was required in business transactions
in particular countries. This index, in combination with other
economic and institutional variables, is then regressed against
economic growth or the share of investment in gross domestic
product (GDP) for a group of countries. Many of these studies are
at best provisional, partly because of epistemological objections
about whether countries with such differing histories can be usefully
compared. Despite the tentative nature of these studies, however,
it is significant that most of them lend support to the hypothesis
that higher levels of corruption do affect growth negatively by
reducing the share of investment in GDP. A recent study reports
that an improvement of one standard deviation in the corruption

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index could raise the investment share in GDP by four percentage

points and raise growth rate of income per head by more than 0.5
percent annually. For a number of reasons, this is likely to be an
underestimate of the toll corruption exacts on the growth rate.

Perhaps significantly for policy, however, these cross-country

studies also suggest that the effects of corruption are concomitant
corruption as
with and difficult to separate from other institutional problems
part of a
complex of such as the rule of law, low quality of the bureaucracy, the risk of
problems expropriation, the risk of contract repudiation by the government
(Barro and Sala-i Martin 1995; Keefer and Knack 1995), or
spending on education (Rose-Ackerman 1997 citing Mauro). This
suggests that corruption is part of a complex of problems. Of course,
this also raises the important question of whether corruption can
be treated or resolved in isolation.

Direct Effects on Efficiency

The first and most well-understood economic cost of corruption is

the reduction of direct benefits from a project or an existing rule.
Corruption eats into provisions for a project and directly reduces
the benefits to be had from it. Economics tells us there is no free
example of lunch, so that the bribe paid by, say, a road-contractor to a corrupt
how official is bound to be reflected in poorer quality of service from
corruption the project. Among other things, the effect of corruption on road
reduces direct
projects is visible when one compares the difference in lifetimes
benefits from
a project between roads built by foreign construction companies and those
built by domestic companies who have had to pay hidden costs.

Alternatively, the effect may show up in the form of higher costs

to the intended project beneficiaries. Take build-and-transfer
projects as an example. A bribe raises the money that the proponent
needs to raise. However, if the level and quality of service has been
pre-specified, then the only way to recoup the increased cost is to
raise the price of the service. Again, this effectively reduces the
gains to the intended project beneficiaries.9 The effect is the same
if an unqualified or less qualified bidder wins.

In the case of regulation, corruption in order to evade rules (e.g.,

relationship
between
traffic rules, taxes, environmental rules) can result in a less than
regulation optimal regulation of behavior. To be sure, the payment of a bribe
and many approximate the payment of a tax or a fine for violating
corruption: a rule. Hence, it is argued, the bribe paid to a policeman has the
over
regulating
promotes
corruption

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same effect as a fine for drivers to refrain from violating certain

rules. However, if one proceeds by assuming that the level of the
tax or fine is optimal, then a bribe is at most a second-best
alternative, since the bribe will always be less than the fine. Of
course, if the fine is in fact oppressive, then a bribe would have
superior economic effects.

The effects of complicity in income-tax evasion are similar. To the

extent that taxes support the provision of the right amounts of
public goods and services, nonpayment reduces the benefits to be
had from these. The bribe paid to the corrupt revenue or customs
official of course represents a transfer and a private gain and will
support the provision of private goods. Hypothetically, however,
the value of the private goods thus produced is less in the social
estimate than the public good the tax revenue would have bought.
To illustrate, if paid as taxes 3.5 million pesos would have supported
the schooling of a thousand elementary pupils for a year, while if
paid as a bribe it would have been used to purchase a Range Rover.
Then a social loss is patently involved.

On the other hand, it is just as possible for the shoe to be on the

other foot. Suppose 200 million pesos if paid as taxes would be
spent to construct some public edifice for sheer display, such as
Imelda’s film palace. If the private person had evaded the tax
through a bribe, she would have been able to build a factory
employing (rather than killing) 100 workers. In this case the
judgement of tax evasion would be quite different. None of this is
new. All it says is that the unjust laws of an unjust regime carry no
moral weight.

In general, however, corruption results in underproduction of

public goods and perhaps an overprovision of public bads, whether
this be in the nature of investment or consumption goods. The less
prominent government is in the economy, the more harmful public
sector corruption is likely to be, since in those circumstances the
scarcity and need for publicly provided goods are likely to be all
the greater. In contrast, it may be argued that the adverse effects
of corruption are likely to be less in economies that are already
overregulated and overtaxed to begin with, and where government
has an oppressive role. In cases where government regulations and
impositions are so excessive as to seriously stifle private initiative,
corruption may act as ‘grease’ and introduce relief and flexibility
into an otherwise rigid system. Under an oppressive dictatorship,
in fact, one would hope that officials can be bribed. Such systems

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would be better with corruption than without it, although

admittedly only as an extreme (nth best) compromise; first-best
would be to radically reform such regimes.

Distortion of Investment Priorities

Quite apart from the direct effects of corruption on a project’s

2nd economic benefits, another type of cost is the distortion of investment priorities
effect of corruption
that corruption brings. Over a wide range, projects may be chosen
less for their inherent advantages to the government or to the public
and more for the opportunities for corruption that they bring. Thus,
for example, some studies have noted that corrupt regimes tend to
spend less on education than on physical infrastructure, simply
example # 1 because the opportunities for corruption in the latter are greater
than in the former.

The same problem is involved in the controversial ‘pork-barrel’

funds. One must wonder to what extent the choice of projects by
certain legislators is influenced by the existence of friendly
contractors who are willing to implement the projects paying the
usual commissions. There was once a member of the House of
example # 2
Representatives who used his pork-barrel funds primarily to
construct waiting sheds and roadhumps in his particular district—
hardly the most productive use of such funds. The same thing may
be said of that favorite rural project: the all-purpose pavement
cum palay-drying area. In some rural areas, one is struck by the
intermittent appearance of concrete pavement stretching for about
100 metres in the middle of a road that otherwise consists of nothing
but caked mud.

Aside from the fragmentation and lack of coordination of

investment decisions, a bias that corruption may introduce is for
spending on items that are ephemeral, consumable or difficult to
verify. Such items become attractive owing to the very illegality of
the corrupt transaction and the desire to conceal its consequences.
Dredging rivers, for example, becomes more attractive than it
should be, since quality and compliance are difficult to detect. The
contractor may always cite the state of the environment rather
than his own action as the reason for sub-optimal results; he may
contend that riverbank residents have misbehaved and silt has
piled up since the contractor last performed his job (actually making
another contract necessary). Probably the largest scale this has
reached is the Pinatubo lahar-dredging project. For the same reason,
other public works projects involving the burying of drainage

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pipes or transactions involving consumables such as office supplies

prove more attractive than they otherwise should.

Corruption may also introduce a bias in favor of projects that are

quickly implemented. This might be especially true if some
incumbent official faces replacement and needs to make hay while
the sun shines. It is partly for this reason that one sees a flurry of
quick-disbursing projects the year before elections. This may serve
two purposes: first, the spending may sit well with the constituents,
and second, the project may carry bribes and commissions that
add to the campaign kitty.

In all these instances, the criteria used to arrive at the choice of

these projects certainly cannot have been that of maximizing
aggregate returns to the economy. The root of the problem is that
the corrupt official’s opportunities for obtaining commissions are
generally disperse and idiosyncratic and correlate only imperfectly
with the distribution of maximal returns to the economy. The
aggregate effect of this is to influence the choice away from the
optimal investment portfolio for the economy and to reduce the
efficiency of every peso’s worth of investment.

Rent-Seeking Losses and Games of Reallocation

Another type of economic cost associated with corruption is the

diversion of productive resources away from directly productive
third economic
activities toward those that seek to capture corruption rents instead. effect of
In economics, these are known as ‘rent-seeking’ activities. They corruption
include a good deal of political activity as well as the business of
lobbying and parts of the business of litigation, public relations
and various types of consulting, even economic consulting.

Filipinos smile at the phrase ‘politics is a national pastime’. What

many fail to realize is that sometimes pastimes are actually very
expensive. Rent-seeking activities use up resources that would
otherwise be used in productive activities. Thus, for example,
otherwise perfectly good movie actors, directors and publicists are
drawn to politics instead of honing their craft. People who would
otherwise have become serious industrialists and innovators now
sit around in hotel lobbies and restaurants cutting deals with
bureaucrats and politicians. Would-be scientists and engineers
instead become publicists, lawyers and economists. The reason is
simply that more money is to be made by redistributing wealth
through the political process than by actually producing wealth.

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Many years ago, Shleifer and Murphy tested the influences that
impinged on the growth of a cross-section of countries. Among
the variables they tested were the share of scientists and engineers
to total graduates, and the share of lawyers to total graduates.
They found that a higher share of scientists and engineers on
average influenced growth positively and significantly, while a
higher share of lawyers had a negative and significant effect on
growth. Obviously, the more extensive and lucrative corrupt deals
become in society, the more attractive entering that profession
becomes, and the more talent and effort are sucked away from the
productive process. This diversion of resources and talent from
productive to ‘directly unproductive’ (‘dupe’ in Bhagwati’s
terminology) activities is bound to be reflected ultimately in a lower
rate of economic growth.

It is in a similar way that one can view the most recent attempts to
change the Constitution, which have diverted and devoured huge
amounts of national energies. The attempts to change political and
economic provisions in the Constitution are part of a redistribution
game, intended to change the rules. Of course, it is contended, the
rules are wanting and cannot support future development. That is
at best debatable. The point is that any attempt to change rules
also uses up resources, which would otherwise have been spent
on production. Rather than spend time producing and crating,
people have been drawn into a controversy that eats up their
talents, resources and energies. This is true even if the proposals
were confined to economic provisions alone.

In this connection, one must mention that it is not only the talents
of the corrupt that are wasted; also wasted are the talents and
resources of those who would wish to prevent corruption. Part of
the costs of a corrupt and inefficient government consists of the
time of honest and morally outraged citizens provoked by its
venality and insensitivity. Demonstrations, rallies, strikes, citizen
watchdogs, volunteer groups, not to mention people’s revolt—all
of these entail the use of resources that would otherwise have been
saved or used for directly productive purposes.

Investment Disincentives Due to Uncertainty

A fourth economic effect of corruption is increased uncertainty

fourth
for investment (Campos et al. 1996). In some ways, as discussed in
economic
cost of a previous section, corruption-bribes function like a tax on
production investment. The big difference is that a tax is completely transparent

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and predictable. By its very illegal nature, corruption introduces

uncertainty: it cannot be completely pre-announced and made
known. Secondly, since it typically involves transactions requiring
the unique exercise of discretion on the part of the corrupt official,
the price involved can be quite arbitrary. Unpredictability and
arbitrariness are especially likely in cases involving unique, large
and idiosyncratic deals (or what are called cases of ‘grand
corruption’), such as large unsolicited power projects, corporate
buy-ins or buy-outs involving government corporations, and so
on. In those cases, no ‘going price’ can be determined, simply
because each deal is a case in itself. Prospective investors are then
likely to hesitate before plunging in with their own large projects,
since the size of the payoffs are unknown. In contrast, petty front-
line corruption will increasingly take on the nature of a tax owing
to the regularity of transactions.

Unpredictability and the level of bribes are also affected by whether

corruption entails the cooperation of several corrupt agents. The
worst case is where power is jointly vested in separate agencies or
institutions, whose unanimous approval is required to obtain a
good or service. Each of the corrupt parties then seeks to obtain
the most for itself, heedless of what the others have already
extracted. The result is that the total bribes are bid up, to the
detriment of efficiency. An example of this is when payoffs have
already been made to some parties in the executive branch to clear
a deal, but then some parties in the legislative branch pose an
obstruction (e.g., by conducting investigations), a technique known
in local parlance as ‘AC-DC’. Additional payments then need to
be made to secure cooperation, raising the overall level of bribes.

This has led some authors to say that the case of centralized
corruption (e.g., in monarchies and dictatorships) leads to
somewhat less inefficiency, since ‘it is always clear who needs to
be bribed and by how much. The bribe is then divided between all
the relevant government bureaucrats, who agree not to demand
further bribes from the buyer of the package of government goods’
(Shleifer and Vishny 1993). The analysis follows the discussion on
industrial organization. In contrast, in the case of competitive
corruption, where several agencies compete to offer the same
service, the going rate of bribes is bid down, reducing the adverse
effect on investment. This last is certainly a valuable insight in the
case of transactions that are often repeated (e.g., vehicle
registration), but it is obviously of little help in unique transactions
(e.g., large idiosyncratic asset sales) which by their nature

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necessitate final (and therefore either single monopolistic or

sequential monopolistic) decisions. The importance of this
observation, obviously, is limited in cases of ‘grand corruption’,
where almost by definition, authority cannot be fully decentralized
to a large number of agents, owing to the idiosyncratic nature of
such investments.

The Erosion of Institutions

Ultimately the most profound social cost of corruption is probably

final the most difficult to measure. It is possible, as has been done above,
argument to cite instances when corruption does less or little harm. Among
against
others, this occurs when corruption aids in evading laws or rules
corruption:
convergence that are unwise to begin with, or where a bribe becomes very close
of the to being a fine. This instrumental or functional view of corruption,
economic which has undoubtedly proven fruitful, regards it according to its
and moral effects.
views of
corruption
It is a characteristic of corruption, however, that it is unlikely to
make a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ rules. The returns to
corruption depend, after all, not on the character of the rules
themselves but on the possibility that rules of any kind can be
evaded. It is in this latter sense that the ethical or moral approach
that an earlier literature emphasized cannot be dispensed with.
That is, an inherent value attaches to adhering to norms or
institutions,10 quite apart from a question of their ultima ratio, since
in a situation where these are questioned the uniformity and
reliability of rules themselves may come under threat.

What the new literature has done is to elucidate the economic

consequences of regimes where norms and institutions are widely
disregarded, such as when contracts become unenforceable and
property rights are only vaguely defined. Douglas North has argued
persuasively, for example, that the clear definition of property rights
was a key factor in the growth of Europe coming out of the Middle
Ages. Clearly, when the question is posed this way, the effect of
corruption on development may possibly—though not always—
extend beyond the taxonomy of its role in facilitating or hindering
particular transactions and come to include its wider impact on
the indispensable web of institutions that govern economy and
society.

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Unlike Guillermo’s essay “Reading the Image,” which is an introduction

to a longer body of work containing various critical analyses of various
artworks, De Dios’s essay is “standalone.” Actually, Guillermo’s essay
could be a standalone essay, too, or complete in itself. To put it simplistically,
it is complete because it has a beginning, middle and end. It has a thesis
(or central idea). (Can you state this thesis or point to where it may be
explicitly stated in the text?)

But I would like to make a point about some conceptual frameworks serving
as introductions to longer discourses and others that in themselves are
complete. If you are familiar with research reports, academic theses (plural
for thesis) and dissertations, you will know that they usually begin with
an introductory chapter or section in which a conceptual framework enjoys
pride of place. As I said earlier, any study or analysis proceeds from a
conceptual framework, whether the latter is explicitly articulated or not.

The Research Proposal

In the next Unit, we shall be talking about the research paper, the fourth
in the series of academic discourses this course covers. You will find that
the research paper combines the characteristics of the report, critical essay,
and concept paper. The research begins first of all with a concept or idea
that is presented in the form of a research proposal, and then, following
an investigation of various sources, ends with a research report, which is
a critical summary of the data gathered.

I mention all these now, rather than in Unit IV (although I will doubtless
say this again in Unit IV), because I want to call attention to the fact that
the research proposal is in fact a kind of conceptual framework, and thus
an example of a concept paper.

In the research proposal, you (the researcher) present your idea for a
research topic, including:
• The objectives of the research or study
• The specific questions about the topic that you will try to answer
• A definition of key terms
• A review of the related literature
• The methodology to be used in the study
• The limitations of the study

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The parts of a research proposal mentioned above do not always come in

that order. Neither are they always identified as separate parts (with
headings, that is). What is important to note now is that these elements
constitute a conceptual framework, one that lays down the key ideas and
relationships among the ideas that are of interest to the researcher, his/
her definitions of key terms, his/her assumptions, and his/her chosen
approach or method for analyzing his/her chosen topic.

Consider this example of a research proposal:

The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development

(ICPD) in Cairo and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women
in Beijing, brought to the world’s attention both reproductive health
right of women and gender equity concerns, which have resulted
in the adoption by member-governments of the ICPD Programme
of Action (POA) and Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA) intended
to address historically-rooted and pervasive problems affecting
women. The areas of concern which both conferences identified
as requiring priority action are broad and interrelated. There is
consensus on the need to address the problem of the increasing
burden of poverty on women, inequalities and inadequacies in
background of access to health care, educational services and economic resources,
the research: violence against women, stereotyping of women’s roles, persistent
how it came discrimination, and inequality in the sharing of power and decision-
about
making.

Since these historic events, governments, NGOs, regional and

international organizations have engaged in specific actions to
implement both the Cairo and Beijing commitments in terms of
policy changes, legal and constitutional reforms, institutional
mechanisms, research and programs all designed to achieve the
objectives.

Current efforts, both at national and regional levels, are focused

on scanning and assessing these efforts in preparation for the
Beijing +5 monitoring conference in June 2000.

the questions of What have been the gains to women as a result of the ICPD POA
interest to the and the BPFA? What gaps remain in our knowledge of women
researchers and gender relations? How will the emerging forces of globalization
impact on women in particular, family, economy, and society in
general? What research and actions need to be taken due to ensure
that the next generation of women and men will enjoy a better
quality of life?

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This paper reviews the literature on women and gender concerns

in the decade of the 1990s particularly from 1995 onwards. It focus and
intent of the
focuses on those studies which were done in this decade as the
research
perspective and methods of promoting women’s reproductive
health and population programs shifted significantly. This shift
has broadened the concept of reproductive health from an earlier
concern with fertility and population growth rates. Consequently,
this had led to a greater recognition of the importance of
fundamental conditions that affect women’s sexual development,
health, and childbearing—conditions which include their
economic, social, and cultural environments (Guerrero 1999).

The review, therefore, covers areas which have a direct bearing on

women’s status and welfare, gender equity, peace, and coverage of
development. Foremost among these studies are those that examine review:
women’s health in general and reproductive health in particular; description
of sources
gender violence; women’s productive role; and gender concerns to be used
in the workplace, in education and the polity, and in international
migration.

Women-Centered Perspectives and Research: The Post-

International Conference on Population and Development
(ICPD) Concerns

In the Programme of Action (POA) adopted at the ICPD in Cairo

in September 1994, governments affirmed women’s rights to
reproductive health, defined as “a state of compete physical and
social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, definition of
in all matters relating to the reproductive system and all its functions terms and
review of
and processes.”
related
literature
A year after, in September 1995, at the UF Fourth World
Conference on Women, the Beijing Declaration and the Platform
for Action put forth the principles, strategies and specific actions
necessary to empower women and enable them to fully participate
“on the basis of equality in all spheres of society” to achieve the
goals of equality, development, and peace.

The UNDP Human Development Report of 1995 captured the

whole mission in the following statement: “Human development,
if not engendered, is endangered.”

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What distinguished “recent conferences and summits on

environment and sustainable development, human rights,
population and development and poverty, employment and social
integration “is their recognition of the pivotal role and needs of
women in these areas (UNEP 1995). Without women’s
participation, without investments in women, the policies are
bound to fail. It is imperative, Secretary-General of the Fourth
World Conference on Women, Gertrude Mongella stressed, “to
address the gender dimension in finding solutions to problems
which face the world today.”

Since 1975, with the UN declaration of the International Year of

Women, the cause of women in the Philippines as steadily gained
ground. Women have increasingly taken an active role in
improving their own situation and in empowering themselves.

Through their organized efforts, women have succeeded in getting

the “landmark bill of the decade” RA 7192 passed in 1992. This
Act known as the Women in Development, and Nation-Building
Act promotes “the integration of women as full and equal partners
of men in development and nation-building.

Since then, various efforts have been exerted to translate these

commitments into concrete policies, plans and programs that
promote gender equity. Advocacy and support for a women’s
development agenda has been strong and sustained at the national,
regional, and international levels. Beyond concrete and quantitative
gains, there is recognition of “the solidarity and strength of purpose
of women and the women’s movement that have unified women
as they work towards the improvement of their status” (UPCWS
1994).

This review takes off from earlier assessments of women’s status

and participation in different fields of endeavor and notes the shifts
relationship of
that have taken place; from a women-in-development (WID)
study to similar
studies; and paradigm to that of gender and development (GAD). Gender here
definitions of key refers to the social relations of gender and is the term used “to
terms encompass the socially defined sex roles, attitudes and values which
communities and societies ascribe as appropriate for one sex or
the other.” GAD provides a broader perspective from which to
examine existing social and political structures with a view to
achieving equality between women and men. Putting women and
gender relations at the center, this review recognizes that the
development challenge of meeting the needs of present generations
and improving their quality of life does not compromise the ability
of future generations to meet theirs.

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 Unit III Module 7 145

Thus, the review begins with population and reproductive health

research from a gender perspective to an analysis of reproductive
health research in groups and regions that are relatively
disadvantaged. It proceeds to the WID literature in agriculture organization
and other productive spheres. The special concern of women in of review
international migration is then tackled. Gender violence research
is examined as well as the emerging issue of the impact of
globalization on women. The paper ends with some reflections
and recommendations for a research agenda.

Adapted from Women and Gender in Population and Development (2001)

The marginal notes indicate the important parts of the research proposal.
Now read this second example:

Introduction

“Young adults,” defined in our research as those aged between 16

and 24, comprise about a fifth of our total population. With the
Philippines total population of almost 80 million, that percentage
translates into 16 million people. But the importance of this segment
of the population doesn’t come just with the numbers. Young
people constitute a population that is full of potential. A country’s
future development depends on how these young adults are
supported as they go through the often difficult period of
adolescence, searching for their identity, and roles in society. Many
will still be studying, acquiring vital skills for their future careers,
but there are also many young Filipinos who will leave school during
this period, sometimes as early as in high school, to join the work background
force. Many, too, would have become parents, starting new and rationale
for focus of
families. The University of the Philippines’ Population Institute study
(UPPI), in their 1994 Young Adult and Fertility Survey (YAFS),
found that by age 19, one out of every five Filipinas would have
married. By age 24, nearly 60 percent would have married.

Young adult experiences are crucial in forming much of what he

or she will carry through life: one’s sense of self-worth, social
affiliations, responsibility, intimacy. Some of these values are
acquired through the family, religious institutions, and the mass
media, but often enough, too, they are acquired by young people
on their own, through trial and error. Sadly, young people
sometimes learn by default, i.e., they are given no choices, such as
when they are forced into an early pregnancy and marriage.

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Young adult sexuality is a particular sensitive area of human

development. it is a period marked by intense curiosity and
excitement, as well as of fears, anxieties, and doubts. There are
many risks that young adults face in terms of their sexuality—
unwanted pregnancies that lead to early marriages, sexually
transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS. Unfortunately, older
adults tend to complicate problems with two extreme responses,
either by “demonizing” their children or by “canonizing” them.
On one hand, there is a great fear of the young, particularly males,
who are seen as being wild and irresponsible. On the other hand,
there may also be denial, pretending that the young are still
innocent. Both views, ironically, often produce the same types of
response: older Filipinos still believe that withholding sex education
is the best way of controlling young adults’ “wild” qualities, or of
keeping them innocent.

The available research indicates that the reality is somewhat in

between two extreme stereotypes. Our young people are not as
innocent as some parents want to think they are, but neither are
they wild and sex—fixated as the media often reports them to be.

Our study focuses more on the context of sexual risk among young
people. We would like to draw out young people’s own perceptions
of sex and sexuality. We want to elicit how young people view
their own risks, especially in relation to concrete situations, e.g.,
their own relationships. Our study therefore seeks to map out the
social context of young people’s sexual risks, and how they
themselves deal with these risks.

This contextualized understanding of young people’s sexuality,

and their risks, should help us to deal with their needs in a more
scientific way. Unfortunately, many policies related to young
people’s sexuality is guided by emotionalism and moralism,
sometimes with the end result of creating more problems, or of
distorting priorities. An editorial in the British medical journal The
Lancet (“Guns, lies, and videotape”) notes, for example, the
American preoccupation with the alleged harmful effects of media
on the young while neglecting the very real problems of “toddlers
living in poverty, with inadequate access to health care, or at risk
of sexual and physical abuse.”

Proposed solutions to adolescent problems often miss the point.

One recalls the proposal in 1998 by Senator Renato Cayetano,
one which was supported by the incumbent president Gloria

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Macapagal Arroyo (who was then Social Welfare Secretary) to

lower the legal age of marriage. The reason? This would lower the
incidence of premarital sex and pregnancies. The reasoning here
is that since young people are having sex, allowing them to marry
at an earlier age would at least make that sex “safe.” Fortunately,
the proposal for legislative action did not flourish but it will not be
surprising if we find similar proposals in the future.

The Research Framework; Aims and Objectives

The general objective of this study is to look into the contexts and
meanings of sex and sex-related risk. Before looking at specific
research objectives, we need to explain two key terms that will be definition of
terms
used here: context and discourse. The first term, context, refers to
situations and settings in which activities take place. Discourse,
on the other hand, refers to what people are saying, and doing to
whom, and in what way. Particularly in the context of young adult
sexuality, we are also interested in what people are not saying or
doing to whom. We therefore use “discourse analysis,” looking
not just into conversations but also a range of social interactions
through which people produce as well as negotiate meanings.

This is different from quantitative surveys in that what people say

– even if said by “only” one person – is significant. As point out by clarification
Thwaites, Davis, and Mules (1994:135): “Discourse locates and of method
orients talkers with respect to one another. It defines protocols. to be used
Discourse structures, in an institutional setting, the genres and texts
that people use.”

More specifically, our research probes into young adults’ definitions,

perceptions and knowledge, including the following:

a. definitions of genders and gender roles (both sexual and non-

specific
sexual spheres); coverage of
b. definitions of, and attitudes toward sexual activities; proposed
c. perceptions of pregnancy, marriage, pre-and extra-marital sex; study
contraception; abortion;
d. perceptions of relationships and the role of sex in these
relationships;
e. perceptions of vulnerabilities and risks related to sex;
f. knowledge of, and perceptions of measures to reduce perceived
risks related to sex; and
g. definitions of “values” (as a term in itself, and of various values
such as responsibility, commitment) relating to sex and
sexuality.

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Our research agenda, as described above, really deals with sexual

cultures in terms of shared perceptions and attitudes. We, however,
recognize that sexual cultures are far from being homogenous.
Young Filipino adult sexual culture is actually subdivided into
subcultures dependent on: (a) sex, (b) socio-economic status, (c)
age, and (d) geography.

The notion of sexual scripts is central in our research. We emphasize

elaboration
the need to look at the “ideal” as well as the “real,” realizing of
of key
concepts and course that the distinctions can be contentious. Nevertheless, by
approaches using different research methods, we hope to bring out the rhetoric
of study and to subject this rhetoric to repeated interrogation by the
respondents themselves, through individual interviews or group
discussions.

Our conceptual framework also recognizes the need to look into

how scripts are formulated and used and how these become part
of more general behavior—“performance”—in public and private
spaces.

The concept of risk, so central in the research, is the most elusive.

Yet, risk is seen as a way of “testing” the fit between putatively
shared perceptions and attitudes and so called “values,” with the
scripts and performance.

By looking at both consonance and dissonance, we hope to achieve

some insights into how sexual cultures are shaped. Who are the
significant others (family, peer groups, schools, media, religion)
that related to the shaping of perceptions and concepts?

Finally, we should emphasize that the research interrogates many

of the key terms used in sexuality research and education. These
include words like sex, sexuality, and risk itself. Many of these
words—themselves products of particular historical forces in the
west—are appropriated locally and undergo important semantic
shifts. The research project, after all, aims to look at local contexts
and part of this is looking into the many shifts of meanings.

Methods

To be able to draw out more of context, we choose two project

sites that have both similarities and differences. Both Manila and
the research Iloilo are among the oldest cities in the country, dating back to the
sites 16th century and Spanish colonization. Both were important links

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 Unit III Module 7 149

to the world, when the Spaniards opened the Philippines to world

trade in the 19th century.

Manila and Iloilo, as with the rest of the country, have young
populations. As regional centers, the two cities have large numbers
of young rural migrants who come in as transients, to study or to
work.

There are, of course, differences between the two cities. Metro

Manila had a population of 10 million in the 2000 census,
representing 13 percent of the national total while Iloilo had a
population of only 360,000. Manila has become ethnically diverse,
a mixture of migrants from all over the country. Compared to
Manila, Iloilo is ethnically homogeneous, a “small big town” where
people still greet each other when they meet on the streets. To
many Filipinos, Manila represents “modernity” and “progress”
while spaces like Iloilo—both to its residents and outsiders—
represent conservatism economically, politically, and culturally.

Two research teams will formed for this project, one for each site.
the research
Each research team will have a Research Associate supervising team
one male and one female researcher. All the researchers are
psychology graduates except for the male researcher in Iloilo,
whose degree is in history.
research
The research will be conducted over two months. period/duration

In each site, the research design considers sex, age, and socio-
economic status for selecting people for interviews and focus group
discussions. For the age variable, we have two intervals: those aged
16 to 19 and those 20 to 24, more or less corresponding to vital research design
transitions: the age of graduation from high school usually being
16 to 17 and marking either entry into the work force or into college.
For those who do enter college, 20 is usually the age of graduation.

For socio-economic status, our division is quite basic: “AB” for high-
and middle-income groups, mainly students from the Manila and
Iloilo campuses of the University of the Philippines. The university,
although originally intended to cater to low-income Filipinos, has
become quite elitist because only upper-income students, who have
access to better primary and secondary private education, are able
to hurdle the entrance examinations. “CDE” or low-income
respondents were recruited from urban poor areas in Manila and
Iloilo. These include students as well as out-of-school youth.

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The second phase will consist of participant observation in different

“hang-outs” for young people. These include parks, discos,
restaurants, beer gardens, nightclubs. We will also conduct in-depth
interviews with 30 males and 30 females in each of the sites, again
stratified by age and socioeconomic status.

In line with our research interest, the in-depth interviews will

encourage respondents to explain how script might develop in
different “hypothetical” situations, e.g., what would one do if a casual
acquaintance at a party were to propose sex. The interview would
follow through on this situation, all the way to what might happen
after sex takes place (if it does take place). A similar hypothetical
situation would then be proposed for a boyfriend or girlfriend. By
encouraging our respondents to construct, and then review and
interrogate their own scripts, we hope to bring out the nuances relating
to the ideal and the real; the private and the public.

In addition to young adults, our research teams will also interview

a ranged of key informants: parents, school administrators, the
religious, security guards, and sex workers.

In the final integrative phase, we will do focus group discussions,

picking out certain themes from the interviews and participant
observation, specifically:

1. Benefits/motivation for sex

2. Risks
3. Behavior that puts you at risk
4. Why people take risks

Adapted with modifications from Tan et al.’s Love and Desire: Young
Filipinos and Sexual Risks (2001)

This second example is a research proposal for a field study involving the
collection of primary data from a sample. Like the first example, it contain
a background of the proposed study (or what led to it) a statement of the
study’s focus to objectives, a definition of key terms, and a description of
the research method. The latter is much more detailed in this example
then in the first example. This is because the first is a review of existing
literature (also known as “library research”), a method that needs no
elaboration as the term is self-explanatory.

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Activity 7-1
Write a 3-5-page research proposal for a library research (meaning,
you will not conduct surveys or interview, but use published
material on the subject matter) on a topic of your own choice.
Your proposal should clearly articulate the research questions you
wish to answer and a review of related literature (including similar
studies and/or articles/books that tackle the same topic or related
topics). Be sure to document the literature you cite apropriately.
Conclude with a statement emphasizing the value of the research
you are proposing. Needless to say, your proposal should have a
good introduction.

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