This is an announcement to invite you to the CSEAS Colloquium for May 2014.

Date & Time: 29 May (Thu) 2014, 16:00~

Place: Middle-sized Meeting Room (No. 332), 3rd Floor, Inamori Foundation Building, Kyoto University

Speaker: Dr. Julius Bautista, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Visiting Research Scholar at Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University

Title: Export-quality Martyrs: Overseas Filipinos in an Economy of Suffering

Abstract:
The Philippine state’s ability to rationalize its deployment of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) has relied on its promotion of ‘suffering’ as a positive ethic. In this paper I argue that a focus on Passion rituals of self-mortification — including practices of flagellation and nailing — enhances our understanding of how this process is sustained. Firstly, I discuss how the interests of the Philippine state and the Roman Catholic Church converge towards the perpetuation of an ethos of labor deployment that conflates patriotic virtue and Christ-like martyrdom. I channel this discussion towards a focus on “export-quality martyrs” – transnational agents who have been trained to embody certain ethical and moral dispositions as forms of export capital. I draw upon 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in central Luzon among OFWs who are also self-mortifiers, and ask: to what extent are they responsive to the rhetorical attempts of the state and the Church to craft them into ‘heroically suffering’ bodies? What forms of ritual agency are manifested in the confrontation of the challenges of transnational labor?

Julius Bautista is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is, concurrently, an associate at the Asia Research Institute where he convenes the NUS Philippines Study Group. He is co-editor of Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict (Routledge, 2009), editor of The Spirit of Things: Materiality and Religious Pluralism in Southeast Asia (Cornell SEP, 2012) and author of Figuring Catholicism: An Ethnohistory of the Santo Niño de Cebu (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2010).

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