Insight

The Filipinos call their attitude "hospitality". Surely, the people of Thailand, Japan or China are also hospitable. Yet, there is a difference, since the hospitality of the Thais, the Japanese, or the Chinese is more formal.They treat a foreigner with extra politeness, but remain distant. A foreigner is always a foreigner.

Philippine hospitality is uncomplicated. At times, Filipino hospitality may lack the refinements of a long cultural tradition. But definitely, hospitality is a primary and mandatory custom. Their smile is not politely distant, but spontaneous and from the heart.

This attitude makes the Philippines the most preferred destination for foreigners who love the East. Especially for those who want to settle in Asia, the Philippines is often the first choice, not for its business possibilities, but because of what it adds to the quality of life.

But there are two sides to every coin. The other side of the Filipino's openness toward foreigners is a certain lack of indigenous cultural identity. Although the Philippines is located in Southeast Asia, the Filipinos feel much less Asian than the Thais or the Indonesians. The Philippines was long governed from America, as a Spanish colony not from Spain directly but via Mexico, and later by the United States. Indeed, many sociological features of the Philippines resemble a South American rather than a Southeast Asian country.

Filipinos give preference to the West in taking guidelines for their identity. Through some 400 years of colonialism the Filipino Asian identity has been partially destroyed. As a result some claim the people have no other model for their own development now than that of the society, culture and fads of their former colonial masters.

In their attitude to the West, there are two distinct groups in Filipinos: those who admit that they are copying Western identity, and those who rebel against it. Those who openly admit that they want to adapt Western lifestyle have suffered long as being second class in Western society. This suffering has a long tradition. To a certain extent, even the national hero of the Philippines, Jose Rizal was an example. For a long time, he fought less for the independence of the Philippines than to make it a full-fledged Spanish province. Even now it is the desire of many Filipinos to be integrated in the Western world, and even to have the Philippines become the 51st state of the U.S.

The second group, those who rebel against copying Western identity, find themselves in a difficult, ambivalent situation. If the person belongs to the educated, intellectual strata of the Philippine society, then he definitely owes his intellectual background to Western education. He was educated in English and uses English to express himself. The chance is high that he even studied at a university in the U.S.

As a student there, he got his intellectual orientation according to American standards, which he cannot deny anymore. So, even when rebelling against Western standards and identity, he still does it along the same Western pattern which he rejects. As a blatant example one may find polemic articles on the relative unimportance that is given to the national Philippine language and yet, those articles are written in English.

Naturalness and Naivety

The fact that the Philippines did not have a chance to develop their nation for centuries has two consequences: a lack of independent identity, described in the previous paragraphs, and a remaining naturalness.

The colonial Spaniards had no interest in developing the Philippines into a complex society such as those existing in Japan, China, or even Thailand. Instead, they wanted to keep the Philippines a primitive country, in order to have easier control and to exploit its natural resources and cheap manpower.

Even now, many Filipinos show a colonial attitude. For example, there is often a rather fatalistic undisciplined attitude toward work. This is not surprising since Filipinos were suppressed for centuries in their productivity as they had no decision over their means of production. They also had plenty of time during those centuries, to learn that they are the producers, who could not benefit from their products.

Some have claimed, that the lack of national identity has its positive side, too. These people say that the Filipinos did not develop the same self-repressive attitude as did for example the Chinese and the Japanese. In these two highly developed civilizations, the people were taught much more discipline in their job and social attitude (punctuality, sense of responsibility, suppression of emotions, respect for social values etc).

Whereas this kind of social conditioning results in efficiency, it should not be overlooked that it was invented by the powers founding and extending the state, less to serve the individual than to suit the state. Social conditioning does not guarantee more joy for the individual, but to the contrary often increases the pressure.

It is a strange ambivalence that colonial oppression can be less harmful to the oppressed than oppression that is generated by a complex statehood evolving from a native society e.g. in China.

The Filipinos see themselves as a fun loving people, and they have reason to do so. They have not been soured by "discipline programs". They have been only so slightly affected by self-repressive mechanisms that to Westerners, they often not only seem fun loving but even child-like.

In order to become familiar with this beautiful country and its people, these characteristics should be kept in mind. The fun loving naturalness and some child-like naivety in many of the simple folk contribute a lot to the undoubted charm of the Philippines.

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