Interview with an Expert: A Political Discussion on the Culture and History of the Philippines
The following is an audio-transcription of a 25-minute interview conducted with Professor Smita Lahiri, Ph.D. of Anthropology. Before becoming a current full-time lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, Professor Lahiri has been credited with long-term ethnographic fieldwork work in the Philippines on historical research and social theory. She has also written many scholarly publications on the anthropology of the South Pacific region of Asia (https://cola.unh.edu/person/smita-lahiri).
I got the chance to sit down for a one-on-one interview with her to discuss various topics surrounding: the history of and current rise of Populism in the Philippines, the interesting relationship between the mass-media landscape and the government, Joseph Estrada’s ‘Vox Populi’ style of presidential leadership in comparison to Rodrigo Duterte’s ‘Charismatic Strongman’ style (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017; p. 68), and as well as the progress of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential term since his election in 2016, including his ‘War on Drugs’ campaign and the Extra-Judicial Killings. Professor Lahiri provides excellent insight via her own memories, personal experiences, and extensive research whilst studying and living in the Philippines.
Interviewer: Kieran Reardon - Senior at the University of New Hampshire
Interviewee: Professor Lahiri - Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of New Hampshire
Disclaimer: The audio has been edited for length and clarity of information
Follow this link to hear the interview:
https://soundcloud.com/shoelocker456/expert-interview-professor-lahiri-final-edit
K: Alright, so first and foremost thank you, Professor Lahiri, for taking the time out of your day to sit down and talk with me, I’m very appreciative of that. First, I want to just get an overview of what your role and title here is at UNH, and what your center focus for research here is in your department.
PL: Yeah, so my name is Smita Lahiri. I’ve been at UNH since 2016. I was here for two years as a visiting faculty member and then I applied for a long term position and I am now here as a lecturer in International Affairs and Anthropology. Most of my research has been in the Philippines. I’ve recently started some work in India, which has seen its own Populist upsurge lately. So I have thought about the same kinds of issues. But my research, although I did work on local politics in a kind of semi-urban area on the rural outskirts of the capital city, I looked at local politics and a little bit of environmental politics and various forms of citizen activism and attachment to local place. So I have a sense of Philippines politics and its context sort of set in the larger scheme of national politics, but I wouldn’t call myself a political scientist. I do not think of myself as a specialist on politics.
K: You’re in the Anthropology department, which is kind of just humanity in general. Would you say that it has been more politically focused or culturally focused?
PL: I worked on political culture, so the intersection. I have been interested in things like how local villagers, in particular, see their traditional politicians and the extent to which their willing to and eager to get involved with activism that could support non-traditional candidates. So I got sort of interested in how the local folks that I was hanging out with, whether they would vote for these kinds of candidates, whether they would campaign for them, whether they would consider running for the local election; so that was a sort of side interest of mine. And I was also looking at the same time at how local people sort of lobby and organize for the protection of local culture or heritage; what do we do, how do we protect these sights, how do we maintain their religious character while kind of trying to find sustainable ways of living here and staying on the land and managing our resources and that kind of thing.
K: Wow, okay. That’s a lot to cover.
PL: I’m trying to give you a few snapshots, you know. When you do fieldwork as an anthropologist and you live in a place for a year to two years, I’m sort of trying to pick out some of the things that I think will give you a sense of sort of where I am coming at, like what my vantage point on Filipino politics is, which is in some ways a very grassroots one. But then I’ve also done a fair amount of reading and following the literature so I have some sense of how it fits into the big picture, but it still is a very local view.
K: So, what kinds of conclusions did you find to be most surprising in regards to the people or the way of life or maybe like government authority or policy presence?
PL: When you ask whether something surprising, in my case, I think it's helpful to say surprising in relation to ‘what’. So, I had read a fair amount of academic literature about the Philippines before I went and did my research, and I had been led to expect that there would be very clear and sort of entrenched power-bases, like I was expecting that people would say: “okay, so-and-so or so-and-so, these are the powerful families around here; that’s who you vote for if we want a bridge built or we want our fiesta paid for, we know he is our guy and we’ve been going to him for generations. And, so, no we are not going to take a risk of voting for some other person whose campaign sounds nice because this is our guy”. That’s what I was expecting. But the area I worked in had a lot of recent migrants; it did not have this sort of long-standing culture of like local landlords and elite whom people felt tied to by obligation and loyalty. And, I mean, there were some people who tried to fill that role but on the whole, it was a lot more fluid and open than I thought. People talked a lot about politics. There certainly is a lot of like petty corruption and dissatisfaction with like how things get done or who gets preferential treatment, and how you need to know someone in order to even like get a permit to build or expand your farm or you can’t buy even if you have a deal on it with someone to buy their land. You know, whatever, there’s just a lot of frustrations like that that people are constantly talking about it. I expected people to take that as normal and not to be outraged by it because from what I had read like that is just how life is. But I was surprised at how much people have a clear sense of how they felt things should be, but the gap between the ideal and the actual status-quo was. They had some strong political longings and ideals.
K: But they seem satisfied?
PL: No! No one seems satisfied.
PL: No, no one seems satisfied. Yeah, because all of the problems I just mentioned were definitely there, and also this was poor area and people’s number one complaint was like the government never does anything for us, we have to like go abroad and find overseas contracts to like take care of other peoples’ kids ‘cause they can’t find jobs at home. Like this is a very universal kind of complaint in the Philippines and an idiom in which people voice their disappointment with the political system. It’s like “my country doesn’t provide me with the where-with-all to stay at home and earn a decent living, and so I’m forced to go abroad and work”.
K: You seem very well-rounded in this subject.
PL: I’ve got a lot of different interests.
K: Right, so I was wondering specifically what your understanding about Populism and its approach to politics is?
PL: I will say that since I’ve been going to the Philippines, which is really since the mid-90s, there have been two leaders, elected leaders, who have really embodied Populism. One of them was a guy called Joseph Estrada, right, who was elected in ’98 maybe? They have six-year terms in the Philippines. He didn’t get to serve out his term because he was impeached for a big corruption scandal and then he refused to resign, but there were these massive protests I think in 2002 that ended up forcing him to resign. But he had been a very popular film actor in Thigala movies, an action hero in the 60s and 70s, so he had massive name recognition. And people identified him with the kinds of characters he would play in those movies, who was sort of like a tough guy, a robin-hood figure, like this sort of gangster with a heart of gold; someone who was kind of crude but had his heart in the right place. And he was very like very profane on the campaign trail, he was crude, he told like off-colored jokes, he had lots of mistresses like he was just a larger-than-life character and people loved that. People also felt like because of his persona in movies and what he said that he really cared about the poor, and so I mean I think for me, this was like a classic example of somebody who was able to develop a power-base out of a populist image. ‘Cause he didn’t have that much of a track record, right, so people didn’t really know what to expect from him in terms of populist policies and handouts and whatnot, ‘cause that’s usually often what you think of; basically going to give the people what they want in order to preserve their popularity and power, and so they’re going to make choices which are going to produce short-term gains for people. Now, because Estrada was running for the first time really for a major national position, people didn’t know what it would be like. So with him, it was really all about the image, like that populist image. Anyway, so that was back in 1998, and then there were a series of other leaders who I would say were anti-populist. Like their image was not “give the people what they want”, they were much more in this sort of like “I’m an elite technocrat; I can handle the military, I can handle the economy, I’m highly educated, I come from a political family”. Like they had many other kinds of qualifications.
K: Would you say they kind of personified the elite?
PL: Yeah, yeah. And then you have this guy Duterte who came to power in 2016, that’s like eighteen years since Estrada, and in some ways, he was sort of like Estrada, although he never seemed like it to me. Yeah, like his very gritty kind of charisma. And with Filipinos, like non-pretention is like really popular with Filipinos, they really resonate with somebody who seems like completely unpretentious and of-the-people. So, on the surface, they have that in common, but Duterte has many other qualities to his Populism which are really different. For one thing, he has a long history of actually administering a major city. He was a major big-city mayor for a long time.
PL: In Davao, right. And his MO that he rolled out after becoming president was very similar to what he had done in Davao. So his Populism was based on delivering a sense of law and order to the people by persecuting and prosecuting low-level drug offenders and really giving the police guard Blanche to do so. So that was not something Estrada ever did, in fact, his downfall was his complete involvement in a nationwide gambling ring, so like, he was the opposite of Mr. Law & Order.
K: So it seems like the personality really makes a difference in the impact in the way that the leader type takes hold.
K: So, in kind of rolling off of that, from a populist perspective Duterte is considered to be a political strongman in the sense that he tends to make quick decisions on difficult subjects without any sort of serious input from expertise in his administration. So, I was thinking, what kind of plausible repercussions or impacts could arise from behavior like this, especially coming from a world leader?
PL: Well, he’s really shaken up the special relationship with the United States, which has been a cornerstone of Philippine foreign policy, and even trade policy, since like 1946 when the Philippines became independent from the United States. So that’s pretty big and it seems like he just sort of shot from the hip in doing that. He has also indicated that he wants to get closer to China. And, you know, the decline of American power, which is much discussed about is a reality. And so, looked in that light, Duterte’s decision to like distance himself from America and get closer to China has a certain logic to it, but it also, as you say, came off as like a not-very-well calculated decision. And it’s actually hard to know to what extent that unilateralism and “I’m the decider, I’m doing this” is an act or how much it’s an actual reflection of how he operates. But it’s sort of advantageous to him to like to present himself as though he’s being the off-the-cuff, shooting-from-the-hip guy. I think it's with Populism that’s always a major conceptual puzzle; it’s like how much of what you are seeing is actually as spontaneous or opportunistic as it seems to be, and how much of it is actually part of his strategy.
K: So, as far as the media is concerned, which is definitely marginalized, for the most part, most domestic news publications in the Philippines tend to be biased in favor of the government because there is some sort of hold on them by the government, except for Rappler it seems.
PL: I would say also that the Philippines Daily Inquirer is a very reputable independent established newspaper record. I have heard sort of from friends that they have toned down themselves a bit, but they still are publishing critical pieces. So the Philippine Daily Inquirer is another source I would really recommend.
PL: But also you have to recognize also that Rappler did not come out of a vacuum like there is a well-established community of investigative journalism that is both pretty well internationally networked and has a lot of legitimacy in Philippine society. So they have some institutional power. Rappler is not “flash of the band” is I guess what I am trying to say. If it were to go away or be suppressed, others would come up and take its place, even though I mean it is sort of singular in lots of ways, but its part of a larger landscape.
K: What do you think is the greatest threat that mass media in the Philippines poses towards the government?
PL: Well, first of all, I think it's very likely that Duterte and people in his circle are involved in the kind of cronyism and opportunistic, self-interested, dabbling in the economy, shall we say, that basically every other Philippines president has been involved in. So I think they are afraid of that coming out. They could be afraid of credible evidence that Duterte himself has been involved in serious crimes, which would be grounds for impeachment. So, yeah I think he personally has quite a lot to fear from the media, and they have been embarrassing to him. I guess I’m not surprised that he’s targeting them so much. But, just you asking that question makes me think it does seem a little bit like he’s gone overboard with the media like he sees them as a huge threat.
K: He’s been illegitimately charging and accusing media
K: Exactly. She got Cyber Libel? Giving facts that aren’t true with the intent, ok knowing the damage that they could do.
K: See, in the US that’s very hard to prove because it’s hard to like prove what someone was thinking at the time like you’re not inside their head so how could you know. It kind of tailors to the idea of our Bill of Rights and Freedoms in the US compared to those in the Philippines if they even have a Bill of Rights.
PL: Yes, they do. Their Constitution is really inspired by the US Constitution; they have a lot of pretty robust rights on paper, and a very robust constitutional law; community and lots of very good lawyers. I mean I guess what I’m saying is although the judicial process can last a long time, it certainly is an option, the government is routinely taken to court and sued.
K: Okay, so there is a good level of civil action that is brought back against the government.
K: So, in your opinion, and through the research you’ve conducted over the years, are there any political or societal vulnerabilities that the government seems to continuously neglect? And, on the contrary, in your opinion, are there legislative and judicial changes that they have made recently that are worth being praised?
PL: I mean I guess I just feel like there is so much talent and human capital in the Philippines that it seems really unfortunate that the government has not been able to produce or generate equitable growth; that a lot of the Philippine economy is still tied-up in agricultural production and sort of in sectors where there is a lot of monopolistic or oligopolistic control. I mean the Philippines hasn’t successfully had land reform, you know. I mean they are redistributing land bit-by-bit-by-bit-
K: But there’s always a fight-
PL: It’s always a fight and incremental. I just feel like the interests of the wealthy continue to really dictate the government’s agenda. In terms of things that it has done, I actually think the disaster relief is possibly something that in some ways the Philippine experience with Haiyan or Yolanda, is that what it’s called?
K: What was it, between 2011 and 2013 they were hit with like four record-breaking natural disasters.
K: So they’ve kind of been in repair-mode for the past five years.
PL: Yes! It’s not so much that the people have been left alone during a crisis and therefore have shown resilience, although that also may be a part of it. But I think in general that the government has been pretty responsive and, from what I’ve read, the government has worked well with international organizations and local organizations in terms of putting together a responsive teams and drawing up what seems like sensible plans for recovery; I think that that probably is something that they deserve some praise for.
K: Switching gears just a little bit, I have two remaining subjects I kind of want to touch upon before I leave you. So as of right now, considering that currently, 20% of the Philippines population lives in extremely impoverished conditions, like the slums, what do you think this does to the influential popular public opinion of the government? Do you think that they are more tailored to think one thing over another as far as their opinion on authority?
PL: Do I think that the presence of a substantial proportion of the population that’s extremely poor means that they vote or think in particular ways? It probably makes them, you know, vote for people who they think will provide them short-term gains or they may not be thinking so much about investment and long-term policies as like “what can I get in the next six months from this government”.
K: Okay, and the last thing I want to touch upon is the idea of extra-judicial killings. So, you’ve heard of them? You know what they are?
K: So what can you expect from a media journalist’s standpoint in trying to cover something like this? Especially when they’re the ones probably in the most jeopardy.
PL: Well I think Rappler has done a great job at covering it. First of all, I think they’re really on it. So, they have photojournalists, they have investigative journalists. I’ve heard from scholars who have actually talked to them or, in some cases, moved around with these journalists like they really do their homework. I mean, they are at these sites, they have their own information gathering techniques all over Metro-Manila; they have uncovered a lot of angles that are really valuable. There are a few cases when the media has been pretty helpful and effective in allowing itself to be a mouthpiece or an amplifier for fears and experiences and protests. So, I mean, I think this kind of situation can really create a very big challenge for journalists to do their work and yet do it ethically because people are already in so much danger, so writing or exposing or digging too deep into a neighborhood might well result in- it’d be targeted, right. So it’s a challenge to find ways of covering the subject intensively, thoroughly, sensitively, but also safely. And they’ve also worked with, not just Rappler, but other journalists, who may be afraid to publish in their own media outlets in the Philippines who have worked with the foreign press, so sort of to get the word out, so which has sort of raised international awareness about stories that maybe they don’t feel safe publishing under their own guidelines. So there’s a lot of different tactics and strategies I think they’re using to cover this to make sure that these extra-judicial killings get covered.
K: So, there’s an article I read not too long ago that was a big part of my Special Issue Brief on the War on Drugs was that since 2016 there have been fourteen mayors or vice-mayors that have been murdered. Three were killed out of non-compliance with the Philippines Armed Forces after being approached on a warrant for drug-trafficking or other illegal drug or arms activity. Two were killed for unrelated reasons, but coincidentally within the timeline. And then the remaining nine are believed, with conviction, to have been tasked by an anonymous, government-sponsored, vigilante for two reasons: either for directly the Duterte administration and spreading ‘fake news’ or for accusations of being involved in the national drug-trade and trafficking and therefore in direct violation of the anti-drug movement.
K: Do you think this is justified? Do you think their actions are-
PL: No, of course not, no
K: It’s a very extreme motif
PL: It’s not justified at all. Yeah, it’s horrific. It’s also not entirely new in the Philippines.
K: No it’s not. It’s either like a tactical ambush on a caravan, some sort of drive-by shooting, or like an up-close assassination, like at a party or at a bar.
PL: Yeah, a close friend of mine was killed in a tactical ambush like that.
K: I’m so sorry to hear that, that’s terrible.
PL: It was some years ago, it was during the Arroyo administration. So, Duterte didn’t invent these things I guess is what I’m trying to say.
K: Was the situation kind of on the same lines as what we’re talking about here?
K: Yeah! So my final thought to you: hypothetically, if you were an independent journalist sitting in on a governmental press release by President Duterte or by one of his administrative associates, what is one statement or question that you would want to bring up or ask about?
PL: I guess I would like to, first of all, is to press him on his own various criminal charges that have been made against him, I would want to know how he would address those. But I don’t know, it seems like an exciting opportunity which I’ve never really considered.
K: Well, I would say that about wraps it up. Is there any remaining thoughts, questions, or concerns that you have that are relative to what we’ve discussed?
K: Okay, well thank you so much! This was incredible. This was very enlightening for me
K: And I hope it was for you too. I am glad it was worth your time. We went a little over the time limit
PL: It’s okay, that often happens.
