Abstract:
The dotoc is a religious devotion to the Holy Cross in Bicol, Philippines. Women
cantors take the role of pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land to visit the Holy Cross
or performers reenact as komedya St. Helene’s search and finding of the cross. The
practice was introduced by the Spanish colonizers, but I argue that the dotoc
appropriates the colonial project of conversion, translating it into strategies of
survival, individual agency, communal renewal, and the construction of identity,
through the performance of pilgrimage. I grapple with issues of ethnographic
authority and representation. The project is a journey back to childhood and to a
place called home, to sights, sounds, smells, tastes recollected in the many stories
of informants, or experienced on recent visits as a participant in the performances,
but it is also already a journey of a stranger. I am an insider studying my own
culture from the outside.
Using a Badiourian framework combined with de Certeau’s practice of everyday
life and Conquergood’s methodology, the thesis explores how fidelity to the
enduring event of the dotoc becomes an ethnographic co-performance with active
subjects. Theirs is a vernacular belief and practice that cuts off the seeming infinity
of the colonial experience in the imagination of the present. The centrality of the
actors and their performance is a practice of freedom, but also of hope. The
performances are always done for present quotidian ends, offered in an act of faith
within a reciprocal economy of exchange.
Chapter 1 poses the major questions and my initial answers and thus provides an
overview of the journey ahead. Chapter 2 locates the dotoc in the field of cultural
performance, problematizes my ‘gaze’ as traveller, as insider-researcher, as
‘indigenous ethnographer’, and sets down my own path of ethnographic coperformance
inspired by Dwight Conquergood. Chapter 3 gets down to the details
of the ethnography. Chapter 4 is a probing of the postcolonial predicament, which
ends with Badiou and a decision to keep to the politics of the situation. Chapter 5
and Chapter 6 take up the dotoc as a practice of fidelity that is integrally woven
into the performers’ everyday life and informed by autochthonous concepts of
power, gender, and exchange.
