Kyoto University
Sencho is a forty-year-old technician from the Philippine province of Pampanga who, for most of the past fifteen years, has whipped his own back to a bloody pulp in a ritual commemorating Jesus Christ’s Passion on Good Friday. When I spoke to him in 2012, he told me that he began self-flagellating on behalf of his mother, Meling, who worked as a domestic helper in Hong Kong to earn enough money to service a family debt. Sencho’s flagellation was a way of appealing for God’s help in alleviating his family’s financial situation. After several years of this kind of self-sacrifice, Sencho too had taken up employment in the Middle East, an endeavor he took on with a self-confidence extending from the ritual experience. “No problem,” he recalled; “if I could flagellate, I knew I could handle Saudi.” Narrating this experience brought back memories of his mother, who had since passed away because of illness. “My flagellation is painful. . . . But that’s nothing compared to how she sacrificed for us in Hong Kong. She’s the [real] hero . . . she’s the martyr.”
One of the more enduring legacies left behind by the late Philippine president Corazon Aquino is her valorization of the heroism of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) like Sencho and Meling. In April 1988, Meling may well have been among the many OFWs who gathered at Hong Kong’s Saint Margaret’s Church to hear Aquino tell them that “it is not only your relatives who are grateful for your sacrifices but also the entire nation.” The president reiterated her government’s absolute support for their welfare, noting that OFWs were more than just overseas workers. She called them bagong bayani—the “modern-day heroes” who, through the economic benefits generated by their “sacrifices,” ensured the very survival of the Philippine nation (RPPMS 1992).
It might seem counterintuitive that the heroism evoked both by Aquino and by Sencho does not emphasize a physical rootedness in the nation, but rather a dislocation from it. But as the historians Vicente Rafael (2000) and Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto (1998) have argued, the discourse of heroism in the Philippines is not simply a matter of exemplary patriotism. The rhetorical force of heroism is premised on the example of exilic Filipino nationalists like Jose Rizal, and the president’s own late husband, the former opposition senator Ninoy Aquino. In dying for the nation, as Rafael (2000, 211) put it, these men and women “merge into a single narrative frame that harked back to the themes of the [Passion of Christ]: of innocent lives forced to undergo humiliation at the hands of alien forces.” It is not surprising that this idea of sacrificial heroism finds broader expression in the policy agendas of subsequent Filipino heads of state, many of whom have endorsed a rhetorical equivalency between the sacrifice of OFWs and that of hero-martyrs. For to do so means to leverage a highly valued cultural and religious idiom in which a Filipino brand of the heroic and the soteriological trope of Christ-like martyrdom constitute two sides of the same coin.
Several scholarly works have discussed the hero-martyrism of OFWs by analyzing how specific ideological notions of race and gender condition their experiences (Aguilar et al. 2009; Choy 2003; Constable 2007; Guevarra 2010; D. McKay 2013; Ong 2006; Parreñas 2008; Pertierra 1992; Tyner 2000). Other works have highlighted the process by which state policies on labor migration craft, or even compel, specific commitments to the nation (Franco 2011; Hau 2004; Rodriguez 2006; Tadiar 2009). Relatively fewer works have gone into detail about how the Filipino transnational economy is a domain for the expression and deployment of religious agency, particularly among men. There exists a crucial need to add to two analytical currents in particular: scholars such as Kale Bantigue Fajardo (2011), Steven McKay (2011), and Alicia Pinggol (2001) have generated momentum in the analysis of the “masculinization” of OFW heroism, while Filomeno Aguilar (1999), Mark Johnson and Pnina Werbner (2010), and Mario Lopez (2012) have considered the OFW experience with respect to the affective and religious aspects that condition the workers’ socioeconomic motivations.
In this article I pursue a convergence of these two currents of research, focusing on the religious lives of male OFWs through the lens of an anthropology of Roman Catholic capitalist ethics. Andrea Muehlebach (2013, 455) has recently described a “Catholicized neoliberalism”: an economic ethic among Italian volunteer workers that draws on Catholic social doctrine in a way that “couples the market to moral sentiment, and economic rationality to the emotional urgencies of caritas.” But rather than focus on the ethics of domestic economies, I am interested here in the affective dynamics of the state-endorsed outward deployment of labor power. I focus on OFWs as export-quality martyrs: transnational economic agents trained to internalize and deploy modes of ethical docility toward what is promoted as the martyric pursuit of both spiritual and economic ends. I argue that the Philippine state cultivates this idea of productive, ethical transnationalism in the explicit linkage of the sacrifice of OFWs with the legacy of exemplary hero-martyrs. I emphasize here the corporeal dimension of this linkage by examining OFW labor in terms of embodied comportments of self-discipline, particularly those inculcated in the process of recruitment and predeployment training.
I then consider how Roman Catholicism, both as a formal institution and as a ritual practice, coalesces with this ethos of hero-martyrism. I intend to show that like the Philippine state, the Roman Catholic Church as a formal institution exerts forms of Foucauldian governmentality whereby OFWs are physically and discursively encouraged to craft themselves into ethical agents modeled after exemplars of the most pious and most esteemed kind. In this governmentality, Filipino clerics have deployed official edicts and proclamations that depict the necessary demands and contingencies of transnational capital as coterminous with the soteriological ideal of Christian salvation. Echoing what Valentina Napolitano and Kristin Norget (2009) have called “economies of sanctity,” I describe how an increasingly translocal Roman Catholic Church emplots OFW labor within a global, exemplary Catholic imaginary, one characterized by an export-oriented mode of production that publicly valorizes OFWs as virtuously suffering, de facto missionaries. In this sense, I will show how acts of transnational OFW sacrifice—in their associations with Christ-like martyrdom—are effectively endorsed by prominent voices from within both the church and the state as a form of pious mimesis.
The corporeality of export-quality martyrdom has a ritual dimension, particularly when we consider how church and state forms of governmentality coincide with the religious lives of OFW Catholic men from Pampanga. These are men like Sencho who have physically embodied Christ’s own act of sacrifice as a means of negotiating the demands of the Catholicized neoliberal economy. It may well be intuitive to assume, as many do, that such Passion rituals simply constitute manifestations of blind mimicry, or imitatio Christo (see Zialcita 1986), which is effective only when performed under certain sacralized conditions. Instead, I describe how Filipino Catholic rituals of the body are channeled toward the confrontation with overseas work. I argue that Roman Catholicism and transnational labor coalesce because OFW work involves the reconceptualization of the logic of sacrifice itself, in which economic decisions are ethical not because they are an exact imitation of martyric life trajectories, but because they constitute arenas for what is known among flagellants in Pampanga as darame—a form of intersubjective empathy in which the body is both the object and the vehicle for achieving both spiritual and practical ends. In this vein, I examine Passion rituals as they are enacted in a domain that Maya Mayblin and Magnus Course (2014) have called the “other side of sacrifice,” in which the logic of ritual piety applies even outside local performative contexts.1
On June 21, 1988, two months after her Hong Kong speech, President Aquino issued Proclamation No. 276, which established the bagong bayani awards: an accolade meant to “underscore the emerging form of heroism which could only be attributed to the overseas contract workers’ consistent contribution to the country’s foreign exchange earnings and the efforts in employment generation” (BBFI 2015). In December 1990, the president delivered another speech that again commemorated the voluntary sacrifice (pagsasakripisyo) and suffering (pagmamalasakit) of OFWs in spite of harsh conditions. Bagong bayani were explicitly lauded for the economic returns of their efforts, with the president proclaiming that, by and large, the economy most benefited from their sacrifice (Tigno 2012, 25–26). In this vein, the awards form part of the state’s regime of governmentality in which a wide range of mechanisms—institutional, structural, and discursive—are deployed to not only regulate the mobility of working bodies but also to valorize them as “moral neoliberals” (Muehlebach 2012) who work for the well-being of their loved ones amid great physical and emotional tribulation.
For the past few decades, the export of labor has proven a significant source of revenue for the Philippines. The country ranks among the highest exporters of foreign labor in the world, a trend that has seen a steady increase during the past forty years (IOM 2013). There are more than 10 million OFWs around the world (CFO 2012), with 2012 official surveys estimating their rate of remittances as high as USD$21.39 billion (Alegado 2013; Ericta 2013). The rationale behind this burgeoning remittance economy is founded on the historically contingent Washington-consensus premise, which views the accumulation of foreign capital as the key to national social development and thus mandates the government to facilitate supporting institutional mechanisms (Williamson 1990).2 As such, the rhetorical force of Aquino’s statement relied on the implication that OFWs were not forcibly driven out by a systematic failure of domestic governance, but were instead virtuous individuals voluntarily pursuing their vocations in an open, democratic labor market. And while Aquino linked these pursuits with the prospect of religious transcendence in the afterlife, it was simultaneously a reiteration of the state’s ideological promise that overseas work would yield material and economic reward in this life, provided that OFWs maintained their roles as drivers of the remittance economy.
The conflation of the material and soteriological returns of overseas labor, one that forms the basis of a Filipino brand of Catholicized neoliberalism, is premised on OFWs voluntarily devoting themselves to the pursuit of capital. Muehlebach (2013, 461) describes a market-driven welfare system that depends on the volition of “hypermoralized” neoliberals who operationalize the virtues of love, caritas, and volunteerism in the domestic economy in Lombardy, Italy. In the Filipino setting, Catholicized neoliberalism makes for an ethic whose agents are lauded for their willing capacity to channel their sacrifice into modes of transnational labor power, which the state monetizes for the greater good of the nation. The extent to which this monetization can be justified relies on the state’s obfuscation of its own role in contributing to the volatility of transnational work and in its failure to mitigate the need for labor export in the first place (Franco 2011; Tadiar 2009; Tyner 2000). This obfuscation, more significantly, can only be achieved if the casualties of overseas labor are valorized as the paragon of the highest civic and pious virtues.
There are many examples of OFWs who have paid the ultimate price in the course of their overseas deployment. To name but a few, there is Maricris Sioson, a twenty-two-year-old entertainer, who died under mysterious and contested circumstances in Japan in 1991, and Flor Contemplacion, a domestic helper in Singapore, who was tried, convicted, and later executed for double murder in spite of mitigating evidence (Franco 2011, 140). In Filipino Catholicized neoliberalism, the plight of victimized individuals like these was discursively packaged as the unfortunate but necessary cost of pursuing a greater socioeconomic and moral ideal. The state’s evocation of sentiments of pity and empathic solidarity attempted to reiterate the nobility of their overseas deployment, in spite of the real dangers associated with such work. For to perish in this moral neoliberalism does not constitute a failure, but pays tribute to OFWs as the inheritors of the legacy of fallen martyrs. Contemplacion and Sioson, like the hero-martyrs, devoted themselves to overseas work amid the threat of death, personifying the radically ascetic logic of self-sacrifice. Under this logic, the heroic body of the OFW is measured not according to major revolutionary or miraculous deeds, but in the everyday toil of fulfilling one’s transnational vocation even at the pain of death.
The efforts of the Philippine state to legitimize the overseas deployment of OFWs do not derive their persuasive force solely from appeals to the worker’s duty of financial providership. I am arguing that the legitimacy of transnational labor is contingent on the state’s capacity to promulgate an idiom saturated with both patriotic and pious meanings—one in which capitalist accumulation is rhetorically promoted as an arena of ethical and moral subject formation. Beyond the level of the discursive, however, it is instructive to ask how OFWs come to internalize and embody such ethical subject positions in the pursuit of transnational work. James Faubion (2011, 52) cites Caroline Humphrey (1997) in reminding us that “there is more to the ethical conditioning of a subject than its relation to duty, to which the ethical relevance of exemplars (known in much contemporary ethical discourse under the pale rubric of the ‘role model’) cannot be reduced. One’s duties are one matter; one’s values and the ideals to which one might aspire are often quite another.”
Faubion here outlines the contours of an anthropology of ethics based on a kind of nurturism, one that channels an Aristotelian position in its emphasis on pedagogy and embodied practice. I provide empirical specificity to this position by focusing on the process of crafting what could be termed “export-quality martyrs.” By this I mean OFWs who have not just been convinced of the normativity of transnational suffering but have been physically disciplined to deploy certain ethical and moral values of Christian humility onto translational domains. This occurs as part of a process of labor brokerage, which—drawing from the ethnographic work of Anna Romina Guevarra (2010) and Robyn Rodriguez (2006)—refers to the activities of nongovernmental institutions working in concert with the state in molding OFW bodies into productive economic units.
Labor brokerage involves the regimented implementation of corporal techniques in the process of predeparture training to enhance the OFW’s competitive advantage. The training provided, however, does not merely impart job-specific skills and knowledge to the prospective OFW but also inculcates certain attitudes and dispositions in the application of those skills (Lindquist, Biao, and Yeoh 2012). Most often, this involves an embodied pedagogy of bodily disciplines that encourages OFWs to physically deploy what Faubion refers to as autopoesis, or acts of self-regulation and self-cultivation.
The pedagogical and practical aspects of export-quality martyrdom were explained to me by Sencho, who recalled that in his predeparture training, he was asked to familiarize himself with several thick manuals on various kinds of machinery that he would likely encounter. Most of the seminars, he recalls, served to remind him about strict policies against misbehavior. “Even though our employers would push us to the limit or even be unfair . . . they said that I shouldn’t be too macho, too aggressive . . . and picking fights would not only be stupid, it would be useless because that’s not our country, we’re just employees.”3 The predeparture training emphasized the “Christ-like” physical suppression of instinct in favor of a self-enforced deference to hierarchy. Indeed, it required “playing down your manly arrogance [kayabangan].” Even in the face of emasculation, workers ought to just “bow your head, take it in, and just think about your family.” In the training he received he not so much acquired new skills but had reiterated to him modes of religiously inspired corporeal repression, which were needed to endure what he already knew from OFW relatives and friends was a harsh and tumultuous working environment. Failure to embody this discipline meant that one was simply “not cut out for ‘making it’ overseas.”
The scenario drawn here brings Faubion’s ideas about the ethics and pedagogy of autopoesis in conversation with what Daromir Rudnyckyj has called a “spiritual economy.”4 Rudnyckyj (2009, 106) refers to the assemblage of programs and projects among Indonesian Muslim workers that “seek to simultaneously transform workers into more pious religious subjects and more productive economic subjects.” Similarly, OFW labor brokerage comprises formal institutions that act to reconfigure the idea of work (with its attendant occupational hazards) as an arena of religious piety. Whereas a spiritual economy for Indonesian Muslim workers involves the inculcation of ethics of accountability, transparency, and rationalization for middle-class workers, export-quality martyrs are mainly unskilled workers made to embody modes of docility, obedience, and subservience. Granted, the Indonesian workers with whom Rudnyckyj has engaged occupy different class positions from the OFWs I have interacted with. But the processes are similar in the sense that both groups are physically conditioned to internalize and self-regulate those attributes that are deemed commensurable with both their faith and neoliberal ideals of capital accumulation.
Muehlebach (2013, 459) similarly describes the training of the Lombardian moral neoliberal, who is made to go to training courses fostering the “concrete production of a normative moral subject governed by a particular moral style—a citizen responsive to suffering in ways reminiscent of Catholic demeanor and disposition.” James Tyner (2000) and Jean Franco (2011, 53), meanwhile, describe the embodied disciplinary regimes of Filipina migrant workers, who were instructed to literally contort their bodies—hands folded, head slightly bowed, and holding neutral, reticent expressions. These postures imply not just the OFWs’ possession of a specific skill set but also of the cultivated, domesticated, and disciplined will deemed desirable by potential employers. It is these disciplines of corporeal self-regulation that manifest what Guevarra (2010) calls the OFWs’ “added export value,” underscoring the Filipino worker’s autopoetic edge in the competitive global political economy.
From the perspective of state governmentality, then, OFWs are heroic not simply because they acquire certain skills of the trade. Somewhat the opposite actually holds true. The training regimes, in inculcating modes of humility and self-surveillance, effectively encourage a downplaying of the worker’s agency, or at least a tempered exertion of aptitude and skill. These programs produce a unique form of labor power in which workers are coached to internalize the idea that good employees are deferential and humble, not just in their ability to follow orders but also in “not acting better” than their supervisors (Guevarra 2010, 146). In this sense, the capacity for self-effacing humility is thought of as a learned form of self-regulated bodily circumscription, attenuated specifically by the inspiration of faith and the demands of the potential employer, regardless of one’s natural instincts or intuitions. Labor brokerage contributes to the efforts of the state to reconfigure sacrifice into a monetizable ethics of self-discipline, one that sees heroism as the ability to “discipline [workers] to comply and accept what is supposed to be this ‘natural’ situation, of being maltreated by their employers” (Guevarra 2010, 148).
What other factors contribute to the rhetorical persuasiveness of the state and its brokers in promulgating this reconfigured ideal of voluntary sacrifice? Religious organizations, I argue, prove crucial in this process, and I will now turn to their role in providing the doctrinal and ideological scaffolding for Catholicized neoliberalism.
Father Martin is a Roman Catholic parish priest from Manila whom I spoke to about the relationship between Catholicism and OFWs. While he expressed interest in discussing the nature of the OFW economy, our conversation often shifted to official church views on the corrosive effect of wealth on the moral and spiritual lives of OFWs. Father Martin narrated some scenarios in which OFW families had disintegrated as a result of migrant workers succumbing to the allure of financial empowerment. “Why did [he] buy all that iPhone and things for himself . . . are you not going to put [the money] to your children? Why not save the money, or at least put it to a sari sari [provision] store?” These were rhetorical questions not meant to encourage OFWs to commit to monastic self-denial. Rather, his views pointed to an idea of martyric virtue no longer premised on the necessity of death, but on the very act of struggle and perseverance in the tumultuous transnational domain. “The bagong bayani,” he clarified, “it is about sweat.”
Father Martin’s sentiments resonate with the larger institutional Philippine Catholic Church position, which equates the ethical pursuit of material wealth with soteriological reward. Even just a few weeks before Aquino’s bagong bayani speech in Hong Kong, the then-president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), Archbishop Leonardo Legaspi (1988), associated the pursuit of overseas labor with divine reward in stating that “for every pain, there is also joy. For every sacrifice, there is a corresponding good. Migration of peoples, in whatever form or for whatever reason, has always foreshadowed the unfolding of greater designs of God.” The association of transnational work and spiritual virtue corresponds to the church’s official mandate as it was promulgated in the Second Vatican Council held in Rome in 1963–1965, and reiterated during the CBCP Second Plenary Council (PCP-II) held in Manila in 1991. In these gatherings, Filipino clerics emphasized the church’s responsibility to develop the “total human person,” which referred not just to matters of mysticism or spirituality but also to its role in facilitating economic self-reliance among its flock. As such, the church has provided material support to OFW deployment through its pastoral care institutions, which not only lobby for workers’ rights but also offer assistance in fostering conditions conducive to capital accumulation. As Robert Ellwood (1988, 137) put it: “The idea that poverty could be a state of blessedness in itself, a favorite of preachers as recently as a century ago, is now hopelessly discredited . . . even the most conservative pulpiteers nowadays exhort their poor to get ahead, but to do it by nonviolent means.”
That the Catholic Church would invest in the preservation and enhancement of OFW labor power is itself an expression of specific forms of religious governmentality, which Napolitano and Norget (2009, 253) describe as “economies of sanctity.” By this they refer to how Roman Catholic institutions actively promote processes of “recirculation, mimesis and relocalization” to foster an “embodied sense of belonging and allegiance to a larger, global Catholic community and project.” The Filipino Catholic Church’s endorsement of an economy of sanctity is undergirded by (1) the identification of transnational domains as a new spiritual frontier in the global mission of Roman Catholic expansion; and (2) the valorization of OFW work as mimetic martyrdom by way of effort, rather than death.
First, in Roman Catholic governmentality, OFWs do not simply constitute economic units but serve as de facto missionaries who, even in the pursuit of economic uplift, contribute to spreading the faith. The 1991 PCP-II indeed lauded the dispersal of Filipino workers as a solution to the challenges of declining rates of sacramental adherence. Far from emphasizing a prosperity gospel in the conventional sense (Koning 2009; Wiegele 2005), official CBCP pastoral letters, as well as published opinion pieces from well-respected Catholic bishops in the early 2000s, are explicit about “the missionary potential of Filipino migrant workers abroad” (Quevedo 2000). In his “Pastoral Letter on the Church’s Mission In the New Millennium,” Archbishop Orlando Quevedo (2000), then the CBCP’s president, reiterated this potential with clarity: “Our overseas workers have in so many instances become missionaries, bringing the Gospel and Faith where these have not been present, renewing and reactivating Christian life and practice where these have been in decline.”
Second, the missionary potential of OFWs is legitimized through their valorization as exemplary sufferers in foreign contexts—a theme strongly resonant in CBCP pastoral letters between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. In 1995, for example, the “Pastoral Letter on Filipino Migrant Workers” endorsed the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act, affirming the relevance of the words of Pope Pius XII who, in 1957, had reiterated the virtue of persevering through hardship as a way of acquiring the fruits of salvation. The 1995 CBCP letter characterized the experience of overseas labor within a logic of persisting through moral and physical tribulation as a form of transnational mimesis, pointing to the example of “our migrant saint” San Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino martyred while serving in overseas mission (Morelos 1995). Father Martin echoed the spirit of this mimesis: “We should look to [San Lorenzo], for he was, in a way, an OFW too [in] helping with the Church mission overseas.”
For CBCP clerics, both high-ranking and at the pastoral level, to rhetorically anoint the OFWs as exemplary sufferers and de facto missionary martyrs resembles what Mayblin (2014) described among Roman Catholics in Brazil, who are singled out for public praise and respectful treatment as sofredors (sufferers). Mayblin (2014, 356) construes such recognition as forms of “consummation,” in which “a person’s hidden sacrifices are acknowledged and, as such, made productive.” My contribution here is to argue that religious institutions, in their consummation of idealized OFW sacrifice, act like the state in encouraging the self-cultivation of export-quality martyrdom. But unlike the state, which relies on the facility of labor brokers, the effectiveness of the Catholic Church in depicting transnational labor as a process of pious mimesis draws from the performance of certain rituals that, ironically, are conducted in ways that the CBCP itself seeks to circumscribe and prohibit.
In the next section I describe the relationship between OFW work and embodied ritual agencies performed outside of the church’s jurisdictional purview in Pampanga. By “ritual agency,” I refer to ritual as an arena in which distinct subjective and intersubjective states of affect are cultivated (Asad 1983). With Marcel Mauss (1973), I refer to rituals as “body techniques,” which means to say they constitute forms of embodied practical reason oriented toward intentions and outcomes outside the sphere of formalized performance.
Pampanga is a province located in the region of central Luzon in the Philippines. This region has the second-highest number of OFWs, 14.1 percent, according to a survey conducted by the Philippine National Statistics Office in 2012 (Ericta 2013). Pampanga has ranked as high as third on the list of highest OFW deployments by province, surpassed only by Manila and Quezon City (PSA 2012; Pavia 2012). Aside from being a major source of OFW manpower, Pampanga is also well known throughout the country as one of the few places in which rituals of self-mortification continue to be performed. It would make for a conservative estimate to say that hundreds of Catholic penitents publicly self-flagellate every Good Friday, while many others engage in a reenactment of the Passion story, culminating in the nailing of tens of devotees.5
Given the high density of both ritual and transnational energy in the province, I want to discuss the intersection of these two domains in asking how rituals condition the pursuit of overseas work. How are the embodied, pious subjectivities crafted in Passion rituals relevant in OFW strategies to confront the challenge of transnational labor? To the extent that the rituals channel those virtues of humility and self-effacement that, as I have shown, are inculcated in the disciplinary regimes of church and state discourses of governmentality, in what ways are self-mortifiers particularly responsive to the brand of hero-martyrdom endorsed by politicians and clerics?
The first point to establish is that Passion rituals are performed beyond the official jurisdiction of the church institution. In the sixteenth century, converts throughout the Philippines were encouraged to seek penance and atonement through Spanish friar-supervised exercises of pain infliction collectively known as disciplina (Barker 1998; Bräunlein 2009; Zialcita 1986). Disciplina, according to Talal Asad (1987, 159), emphasized the repression of bodily comportments to cultivate “the conditions within which obedient wills are created.” Yet although the colonial Catholic Church in the Philippines at one point had served as the main facilitator of these rituals, all forms of physical disciplina have, since the eighteenth century, been deemed illicit by Filipino clergy (Blanco 2009). Church proscriptions against Passion rituals revolve primarily around their presumed capacity to undermine the church’s sacerdotal function. Since Passion rituals were being performed in ways that did not involve clerical authority or mediation, they were denounced as diminishing the primacy of the liturgy and the sacraments in the spiritual and theological formation of Filipino Roman Catholics (Bautista 2010; Cannell 1999). Quite apart from these counterarguments, church clerics pointed out that the illicitness of flagellation lies in its skewed teleological orientation. Rather than focusing on the curbing of subjective will as a form of radical, ascetic transcendence—something that the Church Fathers had earlier seen as a testament to pious virtue—flagellation in Pampanga concentrates on an appeal for divine intervention in the here and now. Its orientation is immanent, not transcendent.
In any case, the great majority of self-mortifiers do not think of flagellation as a theological or doctrinal act aimed at achieving or imitating the full consummation of the Passion episode—that is, Christ’s exemplary, martyric death. It constitutes, rather, an offering of the flagellant’s own body-in-pain as a way of appealing for direct divine intervention in the here and now. To the extent that self-mortification does not need sacramental or clerical involvement, flagellation is tantamount to a renegotiation of the soteriological promise of Christian salvation channeled into transnational domains.
Elsewhere (Bautista 2011, 2014) I have indicated that self-mortification is most commonly associated with sentiments of empathy, referred to in Pampanga as darame. While one might intuitively think of empathy as a dialogical process between empathizer and empathized, to perform flagellation as darame means to create a tripartite mode of intersubjectivity, one that triangulates affective connections between the flagellant, the suffering Jesus Christ, and a third party (in most cases, a sick relative). This triadic empathy is a reorientation of Christ’s sacrificial telos—that it is not merely Christ who is suffering for others. Flagellants also participate in the Passion through the investment of their emotions and their bodies in the alleviation of the suffering of a third party. The emotions (or passions) evoked in darame are not simply inner states. In a phenomenological sense, darame are emotions-in-the-world, channeled outward in such a way that ritual protagonists perceive themselves, Christ, and others as feeling bodies. Darame, then, is not conventional empathy in the sense that the aim is to go beyond a vicarious participation in others’ experiences. Darame means to take a proactive part in the other’s predicament, using the body to make that experience coterminous with one’s own.
While the ritual itself is only conducted during Holy Week, the affective motivations and outcomes of darame are not restricted to the temporal and geographical milieu of its performance. In three scenarios below, I describe how self-mortifiers in Pampanga have thought of darame in relation to their transnational self-fashioning, or autopoesis. This process has had two main affective consequences: (1) the cultivation of modes of interiority through which OFW men have managed to confront the physical and emotional challenges of the labor economy; and (2) a reframing of sacrifice according to a logic of reciprocal exchange, associated sentimentally with the moral duty of familial providership.
Sencho identified the practice of flagellation as that which imbued OFWs like himself with a particular kind of inner fortitude (lakas ng loob) to confront the challenges of overseas work. “The [predeparture] training was OK,” said Sencho as he described the years before his work abroad, “but it’s a good thing that I’ve been doing flagellation for years—you learn to have confidence and strength of inner fortitude. You know, in a way, being an OFW is just like flagellation . . . you have to be disciplined and committed to finish it to the end, even though it hurts. In the end, God will answer your suffering by benefiting your family.”
While labor brokerage involves the disciplining of bodies for the purposes of maximizing their economic capacity, in Sencho’s case, it was thinking about transnational labor as an extension of flagellation that enabled him to confront the harsh demands of the OFW experience. Given that his ritual agency provided a form of empowerment, it would be inaccurate to assume that his export-quality martyrdom constituted a curbing, if not a complete loss of agency as stipulated by his brokers. The lakas ng loob that enabled him to persevere was not derived from embodying docility and subservience, but rather from his previous experience of ritual performance—particularly, of the infliction of pain—that emboldened his confrontation with the demands of labor brokerage.
These sentiments are not Sencho’s alone, but resonate with the experience of a host of other self-mortifiers in Pampanga referenced in the work of other ethnographies in the region (e.g., Barker 1998; Zialcita 1986). I consider the case of another self-flagellant and OFW, the twenty-eight-year-old laborer Miguel, who was hired, along with several other men, by a large car dealership in Saudi Arabia. Miguel often had conflicts with his employer and some of the Saudi workers. “They were arrogant,” he said, “and didn’t appreciate how I could do things in a creative way (diskarte). They couldn’t really teach me anything either.”6 This situation made his job extremely tense, as he was constantly high-strung. But he persevered and concentrated on his work, complying with his employer’s orders in a manner that was not recalcitrant per se but just short of confrontational. Could this be seen as the deployment of the subservience and docility he was taught to embody in predeparture training? Miguel explained that he persevered because he “needed to show my family that I was [a capable man] . . . that I could withstand the hard times, that I was strong enough to sacrifice.” Like Sencho, he did not identify the labor training as that which offered him the means for engaging in the challenges of work. Rather, he pointed to the actual, physical practice of ritual itself. “[My Saudi employers] didn’t know it,” he said, “but I’d done flagellation for years. Can they do that? My buddies know it, and that gives me confidence to bear the hardship of the job.”
Miguel never mentioned his flagellation to his Saudi employers in keeping with the directives of his predeployment training that he was to curb his arrogance. In this sense, Miguel’s transnational experience was one that Mayblin (2014, 342–43) would consider under the “quieter, less bloody forms” of sacrifice. His having performed the rituals of self-flagellation provided Miguel with a source of silent strength, one that proved potent because it showed, at least to his companions, that he was capable of a feat that reasserted his “hegemonic masculine privilege” (S. McKay 2011). That inner fortitude (what Sencho called lakas ng loob) came not from the formal discursive acknowledgment or endorsement by the state or by the church, but from affirmation acquired from sharing his experience with his companions (“my buddies know it”). In that sense, a vocalization of his ritual agency—that he had “done flagellation for years”—not only demonstrated his prowess as a ritual protagonist but also further emboldened him to craft himself, in an autopoetic sense, to endure the emasculating demands of transnational work.
We see a different aspect of this process in the case of Ramon, who started self-flagellating at the age of eighteen, years before he met and married Ditas, a twenty-nine-year-old medical technician. While Ramon had few means of earning sufficient income, Ditas’s administrative skills in the medical industry offered the prospect of higher earning potential overseas. Ditas managed to secure a job as a medical administrator in a hospital in the Middle East. “Our children are the only reason why we decided that it was I who should go, instead of my husband,” Ditas explained. Saying so was not so much a statement about moving location. It was, rather, an expression of awareness that her leaving reformulated the traditional roles of financial providership. She knew that she was leaving behind the responsibilities of a mother expected to nurture the home. Ramon echoed this sentiment; he felt disappointed about his relative inability to earn sufficient income. Nonetheless, he did not feel that his role of providership had been completely eroded. Ramon felt that his own ritual suffering approximated the pain his wife undergoes, constituting an expression of darame with her, who was “martyr-like” in embarking on transnational labor. “It pains me, as a father and as a man, that I can’t earn enough for my family. . . . But never mind, I will still contribute in my own way and help her. If God can look favorably on my darame, then I will be able to help support my family. Having God’s favor is better than money, right?”
For Ditas, Ramon’s flagellation emboldens and inspires her to handle the vicissitudes of OFW dislocation. “If Ramon can handle [flagellation] for me,” she says, “then I can be OK in Saudi. It is a kind of family endurance of sacrifice.” She remains ever worried about the safety of Ramon’s participation in the ritual, given that he is the one who takes care of the children. Yet she has learned to take this fear in her stride, preferring to think of how her husband’s voluntary act of pain-infliction has resulted in a change in his inner fortitude: “Since my departure overseas, he has become responsible . . . I guess his flagellation shows that too, since he’s doing it for us, right? . . . Now I trust him to spend the money I send home wisely for our kids’ medical treatment, and even for their future.”
Through the performance of flagellation, Ramon and Ditas reframed sacrifice according to a specific logic of reciprocity and autopoetic, ethical cultivation. In this logic, traditional means of the generation of familial income are supplanted with acts embodying the expectation that God would provide due acknowledgment of the ritual act. Ramon’s flagellation was an act in which he could “contribute in my own way” by appealing for God’s favor, which is “better than money.” The corporeality of Ramon’s sacrifice, one with resultant changes in his own ethical selfhood, situates empathic ritual against a backdrop of the moral duty of providership—of being a good husband and a good parent in spite of the emasculation resulting from the reversal of traditional modes of breadwinning.
The ethnographic portraits I have provided in this essay encourage a more concerted emplotment of corporeality into an anthropology of ethics and affect. Self-flagellation among Filipino OFWs is not only a way of piously inhabiting the world. It conditions the production of transnational personhoods and provides a channel toward the formation of intersubjective relations of empathy between and among ritual protagonists and overseas workers. In a broader sense, examining this interconnection brings to light how politically and economically motivated discursive formations—whether those of the state or of other formal institutions—inflect the operations and felt immediacies of OFW bodies. This inflection holds whether the body is performing a Passion ritual or is engaged in demanding or dangerous transnational work. In both scenarios, OFW men have conveyed a reconfiguration of the very idea of sacrifice and martyrdom in ways that resonate not only with a transcendent soteriological ideal but also with the immanent demands and contingencies of global capital.
In a Catholicized economy, rhetorical endorsements of the positive value of sacrifice rationalize the cultivation of export-quality economic martyrs. In the state’s discursive linkage of capital to bagong bayani heroism, Filipino Catholicized neoliberalism becomes operationalized as an affective space in which the generation of remittance capital is branded as a legitimate return on the OFWs’ physical, moral, and ethical investments. In this scenario, the Roman Catholic institution exerts a complicit governmentality. But instead of solely encouraging the calculative pursuit of capital as a way to fulfill the economic duty of familial providership, the real export-quality value of OFW sacrifice lies in the contribution to a church-endorsed economy of sanctity, in which OFW labor power constitutes an extension of the Catholic Church’s translocal missionizing mandate.
It may well be redundant to underscore the Weberian resonance of this phenomenon—that economic decisions are based not just on a calculative rationalism but on a set of internalized values consistent with Christian ethics. Nevertheless, the ethnographic cases I described offer empirical specificity to Max Weber’s (2001) broader insights, wherein the distinctions between religious networks and state-endorsed brokers, patriotic heroes and pious saints, missionary and economic agency, ritual and financial agency become coterminous with one another. I do not wish to make a claim of direct causation between the domain of Christian praxis and economic decision-making. But I would say that there exists an elective affinity, to evoke Weber’s own concept, between extant religious vocabularies of sacrifice and the way OFWs confront and negotiate the challenges of their transnational predicaments.
I have argued that these elective affinities arise through mechanics of corporeality, whether in the crafting of obedient and servile wills as forms of commodity in labor brokerage (Asad 1987; Foucault 1986), or in the forming and channeling of empathic agencies, or darame, in foreign domains. Labor brokerage and Passion rituals constitute complementary arenas of embodiment in which the body is treated as both the object and the vehicle for the cultivation of ethical and pious dispositions. But while both emphasize Christian values of suffering, sacrifice, and humility, they differ in a very important respect. In labor brokerage, corporeal techniques of self-effacement emphasize a curbing of agentive will as a specifically exportable form of commodity. Passion rituals, on the other hand, cultivate an empowerment of affect, so that a certain extraliturgical understanding of empathy emboldens male OFWs to craft themselves into resilient, empathic subjects—what the state and the Catholic Church incidentally valorize as heroes—in the transnational economy.
With regard to this latter theme, I have not argued that participating in the transnational Catholicized economy is physically tantamount to ritual pain infliction. I have argued, however, that ritual agencies can have profound affective consequences that condition working and living overseas in ways that cannot be explained solely by the efficacy of governmentality. At least for the cases of Sancho, Miguel, and Ramon, the ethical subject of Passion rituals is an empathic subject who derives inner fortitude from a community of fellow sufferers (whether family back home or coworkers). In all three cases, ritual acts cultivate affective interior states consistent with Mayblin’s (2014, 347) observation of the orientation of sacrifice to future gains. “In each case,” she argues, “the sacrifice is guided by a logic of exchange.” Export-quality martyrdom is not a matter of skills or propensity for self-effacement. The new martyrdom lies in the conscious decision to expand the range of corporeal empathy, moving it away from the realm of formal ritual space toward practical ends in the transnational domains of overseas work and capital exchange. In this sense, this ethnography of darame contributes empirical variety to the development of an anthropology of empathy, which has only recently gained momentum in such projects as that of Douglas Hollan and C. Jason Throop (2011) in the context of Oceania.
Perhaps ironically, the pervasiveness of the discourse that extols the economic and ethical normativity of sacrifice is contingent on a reframing of the meaning of sacrifice itself. In this reframing, actions are not oriented to a perfect mimesis of the life trajectories of fallen OFWs, but to the cultivation of states of inner fortitude—ethical and empathetic—that resonate with a religious idiom of exemplary providership. To give one’s life—an act traditionally considered a prerequisite to heroization and martyrdom—has been taken out of the equation in the fulfillment of the OFW’s act of sacrifice. The OFW’s hero-martyrism is of export quality precisely because it operationalizes a new teleological outcome of sacrifice, one in which the monetization of labor and the moral duty of providership become indistinguishable from each other
Acknowledgments I am most grateful to the residents, city officials, and church leaders in Pampanga. Although I cannot thank them individually in order to preserve their anonymity, I must acknowledge the patience and hospitality they have extended to me during the course of my research. I offer my deepest thanks to Robby Tantingco and the staff at Holy Angel University’s Center for Kapampangan Studies for their support of my research in many crucial ways. A great portion of this article was written while I was a visiting research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University, and I acknowledge its continuing support. Versions of this essay were presented at the National University of Singapore, the City University of Hong Kong, Hiroshima University, Michigan State University and Georg August University Göttingen. I am grateful for constructive criticism and insightful comments provided by Filomeno Aguilar, Peter J. Bräunlein, Bernardo Brown, Prasenjit Duara, James Faubion, R. Michael Feener, Jean Franco, Chiara Formichi, Philip Fountain, Caroline Hau, Masao Imamura, Karin Klengke, Andrea Lauser, Mario Lopez, Justin McDaniel, Michelle Miller, Itaru Nagasaka, Vicente Rafael, Koki Seki, Hiromu Shimizu, and Mark Thompson. I have received helpful comments from the anonymous reviewers of the Asia Research Institute’s Working Paper Series, as well as some very detailed critiques from the three reviewers of Cultural Anthropology. These reviews have shaped the present article in many important ways, although I take full responsibility for any flaws that remain.
1. The case studies in this essay are based on ethnographic research conducted from 2010 onward in the province of Pampanga. Interviews were conducted with around forty individuals involved with self-mortification rituals, some of whom were also cast members in a Holy Week Passion play. I also draw from in-depth interviews with religious clergy throughout the Philippines, including high-ranking clerics from the Archdiocese of Pampanga. The names of those mentioned have been changed.
2. Developments outside the Philippines, namely, the Middle East oil boom in the 1970s and the rapid growth of East and Southeast Asian economies in the 1980s, opened up demand and opportunities for Filipino labor, particularly during the Marcos-era regime of “developmental authoritarianism” (Hau 2004, 230). By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ostensibly temporary solution to the government’s inability to formulate sound economic, political, and social solutions to poverty became a cornerstone of its development plans (Hau 2004, 231).
3. An emphasis on the notion of one’s pride (kayabangan) is discussed in the research of Arnel de Guzman (1993, 24), who observed among technicians in Saudi Arabia that “here you really must eat your pride,” and in accounts of female domestic workers who mention that they must be “willing to swallow their pride” (Palma-Beltran 1991, 50).
4. Rudnyckyj (2009) was, in turn, responding to Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (1999), who have described the persistence and increase in “occult economies” in South Africa. But rather than assume that the intensification of occult economies constitutes a regression to a traditional appeal to enchantment, Comaroff and Comaroff (1999, 284) construed it as the production of new forms of consciousness that express discontent with modernity and its corrosive effects.
5. There are no official statistics that account for the exact number of self-mortifiers. In the mid- to late 1990s, Nicholas Barker (1998, 8) had observed that in the province of Pampanga “tens of thousands of Filipino men scourged themselves during Holy Week.” In the nearby province of Bulacan, meanwhile, Peter Bräunlein observed that “hundreds of flagellants and other penitents can be seen in [the town of] Kapitangan, especially on Good Friday” (Bräunlein 2009, 898).
6. This resonates with the observations of John Smart, Virginia Teodosio, and Carol Jimenez (1986) who observed that the migratory experience actually resulted in forms of deskilling. A sample survey conducted among workers in the Gulf region showed that as many as two-thirds of those sampled did not acquire any new skills (Smart, Teodosio, and Jimenez 1986, 111; Aguilar 1999, 124).
1999 “Ritual Passage and the Reconstruction of Selfhood in International Labor Migration.” Sojourn 14, no. 1: 98–139. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41057014.
2009 Maalwang buhay: Family, Overseas Migration, and Cultures of Relatedness in Barangay Paraiso. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
2013 “Overseas Filipino Remittances Hit Record-High $2.062B in October.” GMA News Online, December 16. http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/340027/.
1983 “Notes on Body Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual.” Economy and Society 12, no. 3: 287–327. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085148300000022.
1987 “On Ritual and Discipline in Medieval Christian Monasticism.” Economy and Society 16, no. 2: 159–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085148700000002.
2015 “About Us.” Bagong Bayani Foundation, Inc. website. http://www.bbfi.com.ph/about-us/, accessed June 9, 2015.
1998 “The Revival of Ritual Self-Flagellation and the Birth of Crucifixion in Lowland Christian Philippines.” Nagoya University Graduate School of International Development, Discussion Paper no. 63.
2010 Figuring Catholicism: An Ethnohistory of the Santo Niño de Cebu. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
2011 “The Bearable Lightness of Pain: Crucifying Oneself in Pampanga.” In Pain: Management, Expression and Interpretation, edited by Andrzej Dańczak and Nicola Lazenby, 151–59. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press.
2014 “The Localization of Roman Catholicism: Radical Transcendence and Social Empathy in a Philippine Town.” In Routledge Handbook of Asian Christianity, edited by Oscar Salemink and Bryan Turner, 96–109. Oxford: Routledge.
2009 Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2009 “Negotiating Charisma: The Social Dimension of Philippine Crucifixion Rituals.” Asian Journal of Social Science 37, no. 6: 892–917. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156848409X12526657425262.
1999 Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2003 The Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino America History. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
2012 “Stock Estimate of Overseas Filipinos.” http://www.cfo.gov.ph/images/stories/pdf/StockEstimate2012.pdf, accessed April 14, 2014.
1999 “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26, no. 2: 279–303. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.1999.26.2.279.
2007 Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers. 2nd edition. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
1993 “‘Katas ng Saudi’: The Work and Life Situation of the Filipino Contract Workers in Saudi Arabia.” Philippine Social Sciences Review 51, nos. 1–4: 1–56.
1988 The History and Future of Faith: Religion Past, Present, and to Come. New York: Crossroad.
2013 “Total Number of OFWs Is Estimated at 2.2 Million (Results from the 2012 Survey on Overseas Filipinos).” National Statistics Office of the Philippines, July 11. http://www.census.gov.ph/content/total-number-ofws-estimated-22-million-results-2012-survey-overseas-filipinos, accessed December 15, 2013.
2011 Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2011 An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2011 “The Politics of Language in Labor Export: A Discourse Historical Analysis of Bagong Bayani and Overseas Employment Policies.” PhD dissertation, University of the Philippines.
1986 “The Cultivation of the Self.” In The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3, The Care of the Self. London: Penguin.
2010 Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
2004 On the Subject of the Nation: Filipino Writings from the Margins, 1981–2004. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
2011 The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing Lives of Others in Pacific Societies. New York: Berghahn Books.
1997 “Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Morality in Mongolia.” In The Ethnography of Moralities, edited by Signe Howell, 25–48. London: Routledge.
1998 Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
2013 “Country Migration Report: The Philippines 2013.” http://www.iom.int/files/live/sites/iom/files/Country/docs/CMReport-Philipines-2013.pdf, accessed April 14, 2014.
2010 Introduction to special issue, “Diasporic Encounters, Sacred Journeys: Ritual, Normativity and the Religious Imagination among International Asian Migrant Women.” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11, nos. 3–4: 205–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2010.517510.
2009 “Singing Yourself into Existence: Chinese Indonesian Entrepreneurs, Pentacostal-Charismatic Christianity and the Indonesian Nation State.” In Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict, edited by Julius Bautista and Francis Lim Khek Gee, 115–30. New York: Routledge.
1988 “Pastoral Letter of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines on the Occasion of National Migration Day.” Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines website, February 21. http://www.cbcponline.net/documents/1980s/1988-national_migration.html, accessed December 14, 2013.
2012 “Opening the Black Box of Migration: Brokers, the Organization of Transnational Mobility and the Changing Political Economy in Asia.” Pacific Affairs 85, no. 1: 7–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.5509/20128517.
2012 “Progressive Entanglements: Religious Intimacy in Japanese-Filipino Marriages.” Philippine Studies: Ethnographic and Historical Viewpoints 60, no. 2: 261–90.
1973 “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2, no. 1: 70–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085147300000003. Originally published in 1935.
2014 “The Untold Sacrifice: The Monotony and Incompleteness of Self-Sacrifice in Northeast Brazil.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 79, no. 3: 342–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2013.821513.
2014 Introduction to special issue, “The Other Side of Sacrifice.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 79, no. 3: 307–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2013.841720.
2013 The Virtual Village: Coping with a Global World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
2011 “Re-Masculinizing the Hero: Filipino Migrant Men and Gender Privilege.” Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series no. 172.
1995 “‘Comfort My People, Comfort Them’ (Isaias 40:1): A Pastoral Letter on Filipino Migrant Workers.” Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines Media Office website, July 10. http://cbcponline.net/v2/?p=8088, accessed December 14, 2013.
2012 The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2013 “The Catholicization of Neoliberalism: On Love and Welfare in Lombardy, Italy.” American Anthropologist 115, no. 3: 452–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/aman.12028.
2009 “Economies of Sanctity.” Postscripts 5, no. 3: 251–64.
2006 Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
1991 “Filipino Women Domestic Helpers Overseas: Profile and Implications for Policy.” Asian Migrant 4, no. 2: 46–52.
2008 The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization. New York: New York University Press.
2012 “Pampanga Cited for Efforts to Help OFW Residents.” Business Mirror, November 28.
1992 Remittances and Returnees: The Cultural Economy of Migration in Ilocos. Quezon City: New Day Publishers.
2001 Remaking Masculinities: Identity, Power, and Gender Dynamics in Families with Migrant Wives and Househusbands. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Center for Women’s Studies.
2012 “The Pinoy Diaspora: Where Do Our OFWs Come from and Where Do They Go?” Philippine Statistics Authoritywebsite, May 16. http://www.nscb.gov.ph/sexystats/2012/SS20120516_ofw.asp, accessed April 14, 2014.
2000 “‘Missions’ and the Church in the Philippines: A Pastoral Letter on the Church’s Mission in the New Millennium.” Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippineswebsite, July 5. http://cbcponline.net/v2/?p=453.
2000 White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
1992 The Aquino Management of the Presidency: Her People’s Emissary. Manila: Office of the President of the Philippines.
2006 “Migrant Heroes: Nationalism, Citizenship and the Politics of Filipino Migrant Labor.” Citizenship Studies 6, no. 3: 341–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1362102022000011658.
2009 “Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 1: 104–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.00028.x.
1986 “Skills and Earnings: Issues in the Developmental Impact on the Philippines of Labor Export to the Middle East.” In Asian Labor Migration: Pipeline to the Middle East, edited by Fred Arnold and Nasra M. Shah, 101–24. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
2009 Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
2012 “Agency by Proxy: Women and the Human Trafficking Discourse in the Philippines.” In Labor Migration and Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia, edited by Michelle Ford, Lyons Lenore, and Willem van Schendel, 23–40. Oxford: Routledge.
2000 “Migrant Labor and the Politics of Scale: Gendering the Philippine State.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 41, no. 2: 131–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8373.00112.
2001 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Stephen Kalberg. Los Angeles: Roxbury. First published in 1905.
2005 Investing in Miracles: El Shaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
1990 Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics.
1986 “Popular Interpretations of the Passion of Christ.” Philippine Sociological Review 34, nos. 1–4: 56–62.