FAKING EARLY PH HISTORY PT. 2

A: His wife, Concepcion Abad Marco, stated on his deathbed that he was born on September 19, 1866. However, his October 1963 obituary said he died at age 86, which would place his birth around 1877, creating an inconsistency.

(ABOUT THE AUTHOR) What is uncertain about Jose E. Marco's birth date?

A: Marco claimed that he studied at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila and the University of Santo Tomas, but no records of his enrollment were found at either institution.

What did Marco claim about his education?

A: He became president of La Sociedad Filatélica de las Islas Filipinas, a stamp-collecting organization.

What organization did Jose E. Marco lead?

A: The Pavon Manuscripts were publicized by Jose E. Marco in 1913 and later transferred to the Philippine Library and Museum. They were attributed to José María Pavón y Araguro, who supposedly recorded the history and traditions of Negros in 1838 and 1839.

(PAVON MANUSCRIPTS) What are the Pavon Manuscripts?

A: They were supposedly written as Las antiguas leyendas de la isla de Negros (The Ancient Legends of the Island of Negros) and Los cuentos de los indios de esta isla (The Stories/Tales of the Indians of This Island).

What works were the Pavon Manuscripts supposedly written as?

A: The manuscripts were supposedly dedicated to the King of Spain.

Who were the Pavon Manuscripts supposedly dedicated to?

A: Marco gave different accounts of how he acquired the manuscripts. In one version, he said they came from a convent cook who took them during the looting of Himamaylan in 1899. In another, he claimed that he acquired them from his father.

Why is the provenance of the Pavon Manuscripts unclear?

A: The original manuscripts were destroyed along with the Philippine Library during the Battle of Manila in 1945.

What happened to the original Pavon Manuscripts?

A: The Code of Kalantiaw was a supposed set of laws from 1433, allegedly promulgated by Datu Kalantiaw in Panay. It included brutal penalties for various crimes and was found in Transcript 5-B of James Robertson's translations.

(KALANTIAW CODE) What is the Code of Kalantiaw?

A: It was supposedly discovered by a Panay datu in 1614 and later recorded by Fr. Pavon in 1838-1839.

What was the supposed history of the Code of Kalantiaw?

A: It was initially celebrated as evidence that pre-colonial Philippine society was complex and had an established legal system before Spanish colonization.

Why was the Code of Kalantiaw initially considered important?

A: The Code cannot be corroborated by other primary sources, raising serious doubts about its authenticity and historical reliability.

Why is the authenticity of the Code of Kalantiaw questioned?

A: Scott argued that the documents appeared to be deliberate fabrications with no historical validity. He found no evidence that a Filipino ruler named Kalantiaw ever existed or that the supposed Kalantiaw Penal Code was older than 1914.

(QUESTIONABLE PROVENANCE) What did William Henry Scott conclude about the Code of Kalantiaw?

A: Mauro Garcia was the first to suspect Marco of forgery in the 1950s. Garcia alerted William Henry Scott, which eventually contributed to Scott's landmark study, "A Critical Study of the Pre-Hispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History," published in 1969.

Who first suspected Jose E. Marco of forging historical documents?

A: The manuscripts were supposedly dedicated to the Spanish king in 1839, but at that time Spain was ruled by Queen Isabella II, not a king. This creates an anachronism that raises doubts about the manuscript's authenticity.

What is the problem with the Pavon Manuscripts being dedicated to the Spanish king in 1839?

A: The manuscripts mention "Negros Occidental," but the province of Negros was only divided into Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental in 1890. Therefore, using the name "Negros Occidental" in a document supposedly from 1839 is an anachronism.

What is the anachronism involving Negros Occidental?

A: It prescribes "three hours" of swimming as punishment. In 1433, there were no precise timekeeping devices available to accurately measure a punishment lasting exactly three hours. This is considered an anachronistic detail suggesting that the Code of Kalantiaw was not genuinely from 1433.

It says men should not have very young women or have more women than they can support.

It also prohibits excessive lust.

What is the anachronism in Article III of the Code of Kalantiaw?

A: Marco's forgeries were not completely invented; he borrowed details from existing Bisaya and Negrosanon folklore, culture, and systems, as well as other primary sources, including Francisco Ignacio Alcina's Historia de las Islas e Indios de Bisayas and works by Miguel de Loarca.

(BELIEVABILITY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS) Where did Marco get the ideas or information used in his forged manuscripts?

A: The manuscript claimed that catao was an extinct animal by 1337, but Alcina's records show that catao was actually part of Bisaya folklore, suggesting Marco incorporated information from existing Bisayan traditions or sources into the forgery.

What is an example of Marco borrowing from another source?

A: Yes. José María Pavón was an actual priest, but his documented whereabouts do not match Marco's forged manuscripts.

Was José María Pavón a real person?

A: According to William Henry Scott, Pavón was a teacher of syntax and rhetoric in Cebu in 1839 and was only listed in the Himamaylan Parish in September 1842. However, the forged Pavón manuscript claimed that he was already in Himamaylan in 1838/1839.

What is the inconsistency in Pavón's supposed location?

A: The emergence of Kalantiaw gave local scholars and elites a way to challenge colonial narratives that portrayed the Philippines as lacking a developed civilization before colonization. Because of this, historians at the time incorporated Kalantiaw into Philippine history as evidence of a precolonial legal and civilizational heritage.

Why did Kalantiaw become important to Filipino scholars and elites?

A: Kalantiaw was included in the frieze of the old Senate Hall, symbolizing a Filipino precolonial heritage and supporting the push for Filipinization. He became an "anchor" of a supposedly verifiable civilizational inheritance.

How was Kalantiaw used to support Filipinization?

A: It took decades for the NHI (now NHCP) to officially declare Kalantiaw a hoax, and correcting textbooks also took time. Even today, Kalantiaw can still appear in classroom discussions because the story had already become deeply embedded in Philippine historical narratives and education.

(RECEPTION AND REACTION) Why did Kalantiaw continue to persist even after being exposed as a hoax?

A: Many Filipino scholars responded with apathy or ambivalence toward Scott's findings. His dissertation did not receive significant academic attention at the time, as no major academic journals featured or reviewed it.

How did Filipino scholars react to William Henry Scott's findings?

A: Hart argued that if future Filipino history textbook authors consulted Scott's book, their works would contain "more fact and less fancy." Scott's research exposed how popular historical stories could actually be myths or legends.

What did Hart (1970) say about Scott's work?

A: Although Gregorio Zaide was one of the panelists during Scott's dissertation defense, he continued to include Kalantiaw in his textbooks. It was only after his death that Sonia Zaide released a corrected version in 1970.

How did Gregorio Zaide respond to Scott's findings?

A: Agoncillo continued to include Kalantiaw in his textbooks but added the word "alleged" in the title/heading and cited Scott's work, signaling that Kalantiaw's historicity was questionable.

How did Teodoro Agoncillo respond to Scott's findings?

A: Scott's work was published during the Marcos Sr. regime, when there was a push for a grand narrative of a glorious precolonial Philippines.

(BAGONG LIPUNAN) What was the context when Scott's work was published?

A: By the early 1970s, Kalantiaw was officially promoted by the regime through memorialization and presidential decrees.

How was Kalantiaw promoted during the Marcos regime?

A: Marcos needed the iron-fisted image projected by the forgeries to manufacture consent and legitimize his authoritarian rule and Martial Law for the maintenance of order.

Why did Marcos promote the image of Kalantiaw?

A: Scholars perhaps feared for their lives and careers if they challenged the Marcosian grand narrative.

Why might scholars have been hesitant to challenge the Marcosian grand narrative?

A: The 1970s-1980s were a period of transition from writing history "from out and above" to "from within and below."

(NATIONALISM AND POWER) What is another plausible explanation for the ambivalence and apathy toward Scott's findings?

A: Since Scott was American, he was seen as a foreigner encroaching on local scholarship. His work was ultimately seen by some as undermining precolonial societies and imposing American superiority.

Why was Scott viewed negatively by some local scholars?

A: Some could reframe authenticity as a way for James Robertson to highlight the role of the United States in shaping how the Philippines views itself.

How could the issue of authenticity be reframed?

A: Some argued that it was largely ignored because Marco's forgeries were primarily related to the Visayan region, making the issue less prominent in histories focused on the Tagalog region.

Why did some argue that Scott's work was largely ignored?

A: Glenn May's questioning of Filipinos' reverence for Bonifacio received more aggressive and hostile reactions than Scott's debunking of Kalantiaw.

What comparison was made with Glenn May's work?

A: It highlights an askewed prioritization in historical narratives, particularly in how the histories of places outside the Tagalog region are treated.

What does this comparison highlight?

A: DECS (now DepEd) was considered complicit because it could authorize and award contracts to publishers and authors, but spent little to no effort editing and checking textbook content.

(INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES) How was the Department of Education, Culture, and Sports (DECS) involved in the propagation of erroneous historical information?

A: The NHI (now NHCP) was mandated to endorse historical textbooks. Under the chairmanship of Quiason, it endorsed Abeto's textbook, even though most of the works cited in it came from Marco.

What was the role of the National Historical Institute (NHI)?

A: It was only under the chairmanship of Ambeth Ocampo in 2002 that the NHI launched a thorough investigation into the forgeries.

When did the NHI launch a thorough investigation into the forgeries?

A: In 2004, the NHI released a resolution declaring the forgeries hoaxes, which was approved in 2005 despite protests from Aklanons.

When were the forgeries officially declared hoaxes?

A: Ocampo borrowed Caroline Hau's term "necessary fictions" to explain that people cling to myths to fill gaps in their identities, giving them a sense of powerful and tangible national pride.

Why does Kalantiaw continue to persist according to Ambeth Ocampo?

A: With so much to cover and little time, history education, and the larger Araling Panlipunan, is sidelined. This prevents students from actually engaging with history and leads to passive consumption of history.

(HISTORY EDUCATION) Why is history education sidelined?

A: Merely memorizing dry facts makes the past feel like a "foreign land." Students may not be incentivized to care about history when they have other pressing matters to worry about.

How does memorization affect students' understanding of history?

A: Most students will care about history when it finally concerns themselves.

When do students tend to care about history?

A: Salman and Abbas argue that fakes and hoaxes should be addressed rather than dismissed. They can be understood as a social, cultural, and historical response to globalization and the uneven and unequal relations it creates.

How do Salman and Abbas view fakes and hoaxes?

A: The belief in Kalantiaw is symptomatic of a pathology resulting from the impossible demands placed on postcolonial nations. They are expected to provide proof of their "development" and of their significant contribution to world history, with ancient history being especially preferred.

What does belief in Kalantiaw reveal according to Martinez (2024)?

A: Forgeries rely on narratives and histories that push an agenda and benefit vested interests. Therefore, historians are called to critically engage with sources and assess them.

(CONCLUSION) : What do forgeries rely on?

A: Our systems and institutions are stunted, which enables erroneous information and fabrications to persist.

Why can erroneous information and fabrications persist?

A: Historians and educators are called to engage more with the public and bring history closer to them.

What should historians and educators do?

A: They provide people with something intimate and tangible, as well as a sense of belongingness and national pride.

Why do myths and fabrications persist?