The Philippines
An island country at the eastern edge of Southeast Asia, the great Catholic nation of Asia, shaped by Spain and America over a Malay base, and built above all on the family. The complete guide, the forces first.
The Philippines is an island country in the western Pacific, a scattering of more than seven thousand islands at the eastern edge of Southeast Asia, home to some hundred and eighteen million people. It is unlike its neighbours, for it is the great Catholic nation of Asia, shaped by more than three centuries of Spanish rule and half a century of American, laid over a native Malay and Pacific base. Its way of life rests on a few deep forces. The first and strongest is the family, the close and far-reaching web of kin within which a Filipino belongs. The second is the Catholic faith, woven over older spirit beliefs and bordered by a Muslim south. The third is a cluster of gentle social values: the prizing of getting along, of a sense of shame and propriety, and of the debt of gratitude owed to those who help us. The fourth is the threefold heritage, Malay, Spanish, and American, that makes the country at once Asian and Western. From these flow joyous fiestas, a hearty shared table, a love of song, and a warmth and hospitality famous the world over.
The family and kinship
The deepest and strongest force in Filipino life is the family, and not the small household alone but the wide, close web of kin that reaches out through both the mother's and the father's sides. A Filipino belongs first to a family, and the family comes before the individual; people live near their relatives or under one roof across the generations, pool their money and their help, and make the great decisions of life together. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins are close and constant, aunts and uncles treated almost as second parents and cousins as brothers and sisters.
Respect for elders runs through everything. Children are taught from the first to honour their parents and all who are older, addressing them with a particular word of respect woven into ordinary speech and greeting them with a gesture in which the young take an elder's hand and touch its back to their own forehead to ask a blessing. Caring for ageing parents at home is felt as a sacred duty, not a burden, and the elders hold real authority in the family's affairs.
Binding the generations is a deep sense of the debt of gratitude, which Filipinos call utang na loob, the lifelong obligation a person feels toward those who have helped or raised them, owed above all to parents. It is why grown children work to support their parents for life and feel bound to repay every kindness. The family is widened further by godparents, chosen at a child's baptism, confirmation, and wedding, who become part of the family and add new bonds of obligation and support. And in our own day the family reaches across the world, for millions of Filipinos work abroad and send their earnings home, so that the whole far-flung kin is held together by love, duty, and gratitude. To understand the Philippines is to begin with the family.
The Catholic faith and the older beliefs
The Philippines is the great Catholic nation of Asia, the one country in the region with a Christian majority, and its faith is a deep force in daily life. It came with the Spanish, who ruled the islands for more than three centuries and converted most of the people, so that today some four in five Filipinos are Roman Catholic. The church and its square stand at the heart of the old town, the calendar turns on holy days, and faith colours speech, decisions, and the rhythm of the week; the country is famous for the fervour of its devotion, in great processions, novenas, and the honouring of the saints.
Yet Filipino Catholicism has a character all its own, blended with the older beliefs that came before it. Beneath the Christian surface runs the ancient world of spirits, of the souls of nature and the ancestors, and Filipinos may still keep charms, consult village healers, and mind the spirits even as they pray to the saints, seeing no conflict in it. The faith is warm, festive, and personal, fixed on a familiar Christ and a beloved mother of God and marked by the great fiestas that join religion and community.
The faith is not the whole of the country. In the south, on Mindanao and the Sulu islands, Islam took root before the Spanish ever came and was never displaced, and a large Muslim people lives there to this day with its own faith, history, and ways. There are also Protestant churches, home-grown Filipino churches, and small communities of older belief among the peoples of the mountains. But for most of the nation the Catholic faith, woven with the older spirit world, is among the deepest forces of life, and the Filipino diaspora now carries it to parishes around the world.
Getting along, shame, and gratitude
Filipinos prize smooth and pleasant relations among people, and a cluster of gentle social values shapes how they deal with one another. The first is the great value placed on getting along, on keeping company easy and harmonious and not breaking the peace of the group. A Filipino will often go along with others, soften a disagreement, or leave a hard thing unsaid rather than cause friction, and open conflict, raised voices, and blunt refusal are avoided as crude and shaming.
Bound up with this is a deep sense of shame and propriety, which Filipinos call hiya, a concern for one's dignity and one's good name and a horror of being shamed or of shaming another. It guides people to behave properly, to save their own face and others', and to avoid anything that would embarrass; to be called shameless is among the gravest of insults. With it works the debt of gratitude described already, which binds people in webs of favour and obligation and makes a kindness something to be remembered and repaid.
Around these runs the warmth for which Filipinos are loved the world over. Hospitality is not mere courtesy but a point of identity: a guest, even a stranger, is fed, welcomed, and pressed to stay, and sent off with a parting gift. Filipinos are known too for a buoyant good humour and a deep resilience, meeting hardship, poverty, and the frequent storms of their islands with a smile, a joke, and a faith that they will come through, an attitude of leaving the rest to God and fate that they call bahala na. These gentle, warm, and resilient values give Filipino life much of its famous friendliness.
The threefold heritage
More than almost any nation, the Philippines is the child of several worlds, and its mixed heritage is itself a force in its life. At the base is the native stock, a Malay and Pacific people kin to the other islanders of Southeast Asia, with their own languages, their village world, and their old beliefs. Onto this came more than three centuries of Spain, which gave the islands the Catholic faith, Spanish family names, much of the food, the fiesta, and a deep Hispanic colouring; and after Spain came half a century of the United States, which left the English language, a love of American sport and song, and the forms of democratic government and public schooling.
The result is a culture at once Asian and Western, eastern in its family closeness and its village roots, western in its faith, its names, and its ease with English. The country is among the largest English-speaking nations on earth, yet its people speak many native languages besides, knit together by a national tongue built on Tagalog. A Filipino may bear a Spanish surname, pray as a Catholic, sing American songs, and live by the close kinship and the village customs of the old Malay world, all without contradiction.
Beneath the layers of empire, the old communal spirit endures. The village, the barangay, remains the basic unit of Filipino life, the neighbourhood within which people belong, and from village life comes the cherished spirit of mutual help the Filipinos call bayanihan, the old custom of neighbours joining together to help one of their number, once seen in the whole community lifting a family's house to carry it to a new spot, and alive still in the way Filipinos rally to help a neighbour or rebuild after a storm. The mixing of many heritages over a steadfast communal base is among the things that make the Filipino unmistakable.
The fiesta and the holy year
The Filipino year is crowded with celebration, most of it born of the Catholic faith. Every town and village has its own yearly fiesta in honour of its patron saint, a great communal feast of processions, music, dancing in the streets, and open houses where even strangers are welcomed in to eat, and these fiestas, multiplied across thousands of towns, fill the calendar with colour and pride. Some have grown into famous spectacles drawing crowds from across the country.
Above all there is Christmas, kept in the Philippines longer and more fervently than almost anywhere on earth. The season begins as early as September, and the homes and streets fill with star-shaped lanterns that stand for the star of Bethlehem. In the nine dawns before Christmas the faithful rise in the dark for a series of early morning masses, once timed so farmers could pray before the day's work, after which they eat warm rice cakes from the stalls outside the church; and on Christmas Eve the whole family gathers after the midnight mass for a great feast. Holy Week in spring is kept with equal depth, in solemn processions and the acting out of the passion of Christ, and in autumn the whole nation visits the graves of its dead, gathering at the cemeteries to clean the tombs, light candles, and keep the departed company.
The passages of a life are marked with the same festive faith. A child is baptised and given its godparents; a girl's eighteenth birthday is celebrated with a grand coming-of-age party; weddings join two families in church and feast; and the dead are mourned with long wakes and remembered in prayer. Festival and rite alike turn on the church, the family, and the gathering of the whole community to celebrate together.
The table
Filipino food is hearty, homely, and made for sharing, and like so much of the culture it mixes many sources over a native base. Rice is the heart of every meal, eaten three times a day, so central that the common way to ask whether someone has eaten is to ask whether they have eaten rice. The food is set out all at once rather than in courses, several dishes shared from the middle of the table, and is eaten with a spoon and fork, the spoon doing the work of the knife, or in the old way with the clean fingers of the hand, a manner Filipinos still love for a feast spread on banana leaves.
The cooking is the taste of the country's whole history. From the native and Malay base come the rice, the fish, the coconut, and the souring of dishes with fruit and vinegar; from China came the noodles and the spring rolls; from Spain the rich stews, the roasts, and the fiesta dishes; and from America a taste for fried and tinned and sweet things. The best loved everyday dish is meat stewed slowly in vinegar, soy, and garlic, called adobo, counted almost the national dish; and the crown of any fiesta is the whole pig roasted on a spit until its skin is glassy and crisp, the lechon. The flavours run to the sour, the salty, and the savoury, with sweetness never far away.
Around the meals lie the snacks and the welcome. Filipinos take a light bite in the afternoon, an inheritance of the Spanish, and love their sweet breads, cakes, and the shaved-ice dessert heaped with fruit and milk. Above all, food is the language of welcome: a visitor is always fed, urged to eat more, and sent home with leftovers, for to feed a guest generously is at the very heart of being Filipino. To share a Filipino table is to be taken into the warmth and the abundance of the culture.
The love of song and play
Filipinos are a people of music, play, and high spirits, and their love of fun is woven through daily life. Above all they love to sing. The singing machine that plays a tune for anyone to take up the microphone is found in homes, yards, and gatherings across the country, and no celebration is complete without it; Filipinos sing readily and well, in the family, at the fiesta, and in the choir, and the nation has sent singers and performers around the world.
The streets carry the same exuberant, inventive spirit. The most famous sight of Filipino life is the jeepney, the long passenger jeep first built from the surplus vehicles left by the American army and ever since painted in dazzling colours and crowded with chrome and ornament, a piece of folk art that carries the people through the cities and stands as a cheerful emblem of the country. Markets, processions, and street corners hum with music, talk, and laughter.
The Filipino passion for sport is led, above all others, by basketball, brought by the Americans and taken so wholly to heart that hoops stand in every village and on every spare patch of ground, and the game is followed and played with devotion across the islands. Cockfighting, an older passion, still draws crowds in the provinces, and the whole festive, sociable, good-humoured spirit, the readiness to make an occasion of things and to meet life with a song, is among the most beloved traits of the Filipino. When a guest departs, they are pressed with a parting gift to carry home, a last token of the warmth that runs through it all.
Courtesy and warmth
Filipino manners are warm, gentle, and marked above all by respect for elders. A child learns early to soften their speech to anyone older with a small word of respect, po, threaded into ordinary sentences, and to greet a parent, grandparent, or elder by taking the elder's hand and pressing the back of it to their own forehead, asking a blessing. Older relatives and even older strangers are addressed by the warm terms for aunt and uncle, and older brothers and sisters by titles of respect rather than by their bare names.
The same warmth reaches out to the guest and the stranger. Hospitality is generous and immediate: a caller is welcomed in, seated, and fed without ceremony, urged to eat their fill, and never allowed to leave empty-handed. Filipinos meet others with an easy friendliness and a quick smile, and they smooth their dealings with indirection and good humour rather than bluntness, mindful always not to embarrass another or to break the harmony between them.
Beneath the courtesies lies the gentle, considerate spirit that runs through the whole culture, the care for others' feelings and dignity, the avoidance of open conflict, the readiness to help and to share. The visitor who returns a smile, shows respect to elders, accepts the food and the welcome pressed upon them, and meets all things with patience and good humour will find the Filipino warmth, already among the most generous in the world, opening fully before them. These manners are not stiff forms but the daily face of a people for whom kindness and welcome are a point of pride.
The nation
The Philippines is an archipelago of more than seven thousand islands in the western Pacific, off the southeastern coast of Asia, strung along the line where the earth's plates meet, so that volcanoes, earthquakes, and the great storms of the Pacific are a constant of its life. Its islands fall into three groups: Luzon in the north, the largest, holding the teeming capital, Manila; the cluster of the Visayas in the centre; and Mindanao in the south, home to the country's Muslim people. Some hundred and eighteen million Filipinos live there, a young and fast-growing people, and the country takes its name from a king of Spain.
Its history is the layering of those many heritages. Before the Europeans, the islands were a world of small communities led by their chiefs, a Malay people trading across the seas, with Islam taking hold in the south. The Spanish came in the sixteenth century and ruled for more than three hundred years, making the islands Catholic; a revolution against Spain at the century's end gave way to American rule, which brought English, public schools, and the forms of democracy; and after the suffering of the Second World War, the Philippines became fully independent in 1946. In 1986 the world watched Filipinos peacefully overthrow a dictatorship in the streets, in the gathering remembered as People Power.
Today the Philippines is a lively, crowded, and devout democracy, its economy carried by services and, above all, by the labour of its people. One of the largest bodies of overseas workers in the world, Filipinos serve as nurses, seafarers, builders, and helpers across the globe, and the money they send home sustains millions of families and the nation itself. Through poverty, storm, and hardship the people are famous for their resilience and good cheer, and beneath the modern surface the old culture holds firm: the family still gathers, the fiestas still fill the streets, the faith still sounds, and the warmth of the Filipino still meets the stranger as a friend.