ANTH 125

• When analysing markets, a range of assumptions are made about the rationality of economic agents involved in the transactions
• The Wealth of Nations was written

  1776
• Rational


  (in classical economic theory) economic agents are able to consider the outcome of their choices and recognise the net benefits of each one
• Consumers act rationally by


  Maximising their utility
• Producers act rationally by


  Selling goods/services in a way that maximises their profits
• Workers act rationally by


  Balancing welfare at work with consideration of both pay and benefits
• Governments act rationally by


  Placing the interests of the people they serve first in order to maximise their welfare
• Groups assumed to act rationally


  • Consumers
  • Producers
  • Workers
  • Governments
• Rationality in classical economic theory is a flawed assumption as people usually don't act rationally
• A firm increases advertising

  Demand curve shifts right
• Marginal utility


  The additional utility (satisfaction) gained from the consumption of an additional product
• If you add up marginal utility for each unit you get total utility
• Northern Mindanao was one of the earliest places where Spaniards, beginning with Magellan in 1521, made first contact, and that missionaries had officially been there since 1596

  
• The incarnation of the Recoletos (discalced Augustinians) as an order came principally through their Mindanao missions, and that their mission at Linao, deep in the interior of what is now Agusan del Sur, was established in 1614
• This was centuries before any government resettlement policies were implemented, before the trickle of lowlanders from the north would become the deluge that permanently altered the political and cultural landscape of Mindanao
• Centuries of mission work by the Recoletos has been forgotten by all but a determined few
• The indigenous people of Mindanao did not dress, talk, or behave exactly as the lowlanders to their north, but they could have experienced significant and meaningful colonial contact
• In the early colonial period, the people on the coast were as indigenous or lumad to Mindanao as those we find in the interior today, as the categories of lowland vs. upland, or coastal vs. interior, were not mutually exclusive as they have now become
• The Kachila had, in fact, been in the uplands of northern Mindanao and had, indeed, lived among their ancestors
• A large number of those ancestors became and remained converts, such that the Recoleto missions in Mindanao were sustained well into the nineteenth century
• Significant and sustained contact with Spanish, and later American, colonial officials in northern Luzon island manifested itself in the evolution of "Igorot" as a distinct category of ethnicity
• The Igorot and the Lumad are equally distinct from the lowland Filipino
• The Recoletos remain active all over the world, including the Philippines, although these days they are a well-financed missionary operation and regularly utilize footwear
• The Recoletos pointed the finger at the Jesuits as the ultimate source of the blatant omission of their mission work in Mindanao
• After decades of political intrigue due to clashes with other Religious orders, the Jesuits were formally suppressed and disbanded by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, after which they were ejected from all their mission fields except Russia
• In the Philippines, the suppression was pre-dated by a real cedula, or royal decree, dated December 10, 1757, and Jesuits were officially removed from the Philippine Islands by 1768, returning only after Pope Pius VII officially restored their order in 1814
• The victimology of Western colonial expansion is well-established: the colonizers' technological and strategic advantages over non-Europeans resulted in the "corruption" of indigenous culture by foreign influences, aggravated by the oppressiveness of state-sponsored Christian missionization, the unfairness of forced labor and taxation, the enrichment of Europeans and European entities at the expense of native peoples, the suppression of any and all indigenous autonomy through physical violence and other forms of abuse, and the evolution of a native intelligentsia with occidental frustrations
• In most cases colonial powers could not have dominated their subjects so thoroughly without the active participation of natives
• There is always tremendous potential for abuse in the inherently unequal relationship between Western missionary and non-Western native, an imbalance stemming from gross inequality in wealth, education, access to information, and access to and familiarity with advanced technology
• The missionary presence in the colonial Philippines was backed by a military presence that was the source of many actual abuses
• The Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines at the time of Martial Law was both a collaborator and also the only real refuge from the dictatorship
• In the first mission period, committed missionaries sought to protect their charges even at the risk of being singled out by Muslim raiders for abduction, torture, and murder
• Catholic priests methodically endeared themselves to communities at the parish level, with the goal of achieving a position of complete paternal trust within their target communities
• The extended cultural intercourse between the Philippines and Spain is impossible to parse out today, and who can say with authority that it would have been possible to do so even within the first century of colonial rule

  
• Every contact has its consequences, every action a reaction, no matter how small
• The extended cultural intercourse between the Philippines and Spain is impossible to parse out today, and who can say with authority that it would have been possible to do so even within the first century of colonial rule?

  
• Every contact has its consequences, every action a reaction, no matter how small.
• Even those who managed to emerge from the historical stew of the colonial period as "non-Christian" were affected significantly by the presence of Christian missionaries in their territories.
• The long-term presence of Recoleto missionaries in the population centers of both the coast and riverine interiors of northeast Mindanao-centuries before these regions were overrun by Visayan and Tagalog settlers, until the end of the colonial period-is an incontrovertible fact of history.
• It is simply inconceivable that, over three centuries of residence, the Recoletos would not have had a tangible cultural impact on indigenous peoples.