Loob

The archive has already taken up kapwa as an ontological claim about the relational self. This entry is about what happened when a group of Filipino psychologists tried to build a discipline on it, because that attempt is itself a case of the pattern this archive documents.

In the early 1970s Virgilio Enriquez, returning from doctoral work in the United States, began arguing that psychology in the Philippines was being conducted in a borrowed frame. The instruments were American, the constructs were American, the norms were American, and Filipino subjects were being measured against them and found deviant. The response was Sikolohiyang Pilipino: psychology from the inside, in the language, using concepts that arose in it.

The central concept is loob, usually translated as the inner self, though the translation is thin. Loob is interior in a way that includes will, disposition, capacity for relationship and moral quality at once, and it is spoken of as having volume, temperature and direction. A person can have a wide loob or a narrow one. Utang na loob, the debt of the interior, is the obligation created by being genuinely helped.

Enriquez's methodological argument is the part that generalises beyond the Philippines. He held that the standard research encounter, in which a stranger administers an instrument to a subject, systematically fails in a culture where information given to an ibang-tao, an outsider, is different in kind from information given to a hindi ibang-tao, one of us. The data was not noisy. It was being generated by a relationship the method did not acknowledge and could not measure.

That is a serious claim about validity rather than a claim about cultural specialness, and it applies to a great deal of social science conducted across a cultural boundary.

The reception followed a predictable course. The work was published largely in the Philippines and in Filipino. It circulated regionally. It made comparatively little impression on the international discipline, and where it did it was categorised as indigenous psychology, a subfield understood as being about a place rather than about method.

That categorisation is the suppression mechanism in this instance, and it is the reclassification move from Casaubon's case. Nothing was refused. The work was filed under a heading that determines in advance who will read it. A methodological objection to how psychology is done everywhere was received as an ethnographic report about how Filipinos are.

Zeus Salazar's pantayong pananaw, a historiography argued in Filipino and addressed to Filipinos rather than to an external audience, met a version of the same reception, with the added difficulty that arguing in the language is exactly what makes the argument illegible to the people who would have to be persuaded.

This leaves a genuine dilemma with no clean resolution. Write in English and the concepts are flattened into their nearest approximations. Write in Filipino and the argument does not reach the discipline it is addressed to. Enriquez did both, and the reception of each proves the other's point.

The archive's interest here is not national. It is that a discipline's frontier is enforced by cataloguing rather than by refusal, and that being filed correctly is a more effective containment than being rejected.