Proposal for a (1) Somatic and a (2) Structural History

This is Chapter 2 of my mss  "Thru the Lens of Latin America".  Here I'm presenting the first part:  history as somatic, as felt in the body.  It's my application of my studies in Evolutionary Psychology and the Psychology of the Image to Filipino history, and tells of the encounters I've had with interesting people who also made an impact on my thinking.  One is Rosa Soto, a Chilean historian who specialized in the microhistory of the black slaves who were brought to Chile during Spanish colonial rule.  Another is Morris Berman, who wrote:

Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West

which made me reflect on history as lived experience (somatic, imprinted on the body and psyche) and how best to transmit it to future generations. 

Chapter 2

A Proposal for a Somatic and Structural History

I have studied literature and literary research methods but never formally studied history, nor did I ever feel especially attracted to it.  However, after I met a Chilean historian named Rosa Soto, I became so excited about the idea of doing historical research that I set myself the goal of one day carrying it out in the Philippines. 

I finally discovered that it was much easier to do this in Chile and Spain...but I have done some research in the Philippines as well, and in fact this all started when I first visited the Ilocos Region in 1991. 

Rosa is the foremost expert in Chile in an area that she is the first to have studied in depth:  the fate of the black slaves brought to Chile from the 16th to the 18th centuries. There are no black people today in her country, but Rosa asked herself one day: Once there were black slaves here -- what happened to them?  Where have they gone?  As a feminist, she was especially interested in learning what had happened to the female slaves.  She set to work getting permissions from churches to study their old documents, and from the government to obtain access to financial records dating back to the colonial era.  From these she pieced together a fascinating story and published a book that established her as the authority on the topic in academic circles.  As she told me, "I rescued my poor black women from their anonymity, and they rescued me from mine."


La mujer negra en el reino de Chile : siglo XVII-XVIII. [Santiago, Chile],1988. 153 p. ;28 cm.

She was aided by the sale documents she found in church archives.  Not only did Rosa learn how the slave trade worked in Chile and how the slaves lived, she also learned certain things about the process of Chile’s liberation from Spain under the leadership of Bernardo O’Higgins.  O’Higgins was the illegitimate son of the Scottish-born Viceroy of Peru, Ambrosio O’Higgins.  His mother was Isabel Riquelme, a Chilean woman of aristocratic Spanish lineage from the southern city of Chillán.  During the early 1800s, the Chilean patriot army was formed by landed creoles who obliged their peons to join up.  The tenant farmers and laborers had no idea what they were fighting for and many among them were former slaves.  In fact, the five thousand-man Liberation Army led by Argentine General José de San Martín, which crossed the Andes mountains into Chile together with O’Higgins, included a large number of freed slaves. 

Rosa informed me that, contrary to popular belief, the women of Chile's colonial society were not all retiring, well-coiffed, powdered ladies who spent all day fanning themselves inside the large hacienda houses or in dusty Santiago.  Their husbands sometimes had to leave their farms or businesses on trips that could last months, and their wives often took over the running of their absent men's business affairs.  Many women carried out business activities in Santiago, such as curing and selling beef, running kitchens that served meals to laborers and selling grain.  As for the slaves, the only ones who could afford them were the large landowning families, besides, of course, those who bought and sold them, and so it was in these families where miscegenation took place between slave women and their masters.  Slavery began to disappear when a law was passed in Chile that declared the children born to slave women free.  Their illegitimate children were usually taken in by the families who owned them and given the family’s surname.  Thus, even today the "genotype" or black racial features sometimes surface atavistically in the offspring of the most aristocratic Chilean families.  This is also why, when Rosa is commissioned to trace a family’s genealogy, she makes clients pledge not to cancel the contract if she discovers that black blood runs in their family.

In the end, Rosa realized, the slaves were freed (slavery was abolished in Chile 42 years before it ended in the United States) and mixed with the general mestizo population.  However, one can still find traces of the genotype; all one has to do is take a walk in the streets of Santiago and one will find a few Chileans with kinky hair, broad noses, a certain set of the head, a certain physiognomy.  The few Africans who once were brought to Chile to do the hard physical labor in the plantations (which the Indians did not have the stamina to do) have in effect been absorbed and melded with the mixture of Spanish and Indian and European that are today’s Chileans.  I have been told by philologist Mirtha Alarcón that music experts have discovered that the cadence of the "cueca" -- the Chileans’ national dance and music -- is of African origin.

When I explained my idea of writing this book to her, Rosa Soto enthusiastically explained to me the changes that had taken place in historiography since the 1960s, synthesized in the idea that there are in fact many histories, not one.  There is a history of ideas, a history of culture, a history of women -- to name just three -- depending on the interest of the researcher and the point of view from which they wish to approach history.  Historiography today studies the stories of common people, because it has been proven that their protagonism in the historical process -- until now invisible because it was left out -- has had no less weight than the deeds of their famous leaders. 

The search for knowledge has likewise acquired a new orientation.  Whereas in the past, data gathering was an end in itself and valued in much the same way as money (i.e., the more mountains of it were accumulated, the better) today data is the means to gain access to multiple meaningful visions of the past.  Data obtained through rigorous research is important, but above all it is quality, not quantity that counts, and the researcher’s capacity to skillfully work with information.

In the not-so-distant past, history had been, as Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano described it, "dead letters which in our times gather together the dead letters of past times."  The body and emotions were excluded, despite the fact that history has always been made by passionately felt, momentous human acts.  Morris Berman, a mathematician and historian of science from Seattle, Washington, was the second important influence in my process of reflecting on how history can be made relevant to the present.  He developed the idea of including the "somatic" dimension in the book, Coming to Our Senses.  I immediately resonated with his engaging description of his first encounter with external history in high school:

      I was born and raised in upstate New York.  During my high school years, we were required, as part of the history sequence of our education, to spend time learning about local and regional history.  Our textbook had a chapter about the Colonial period, another about the defeat of the Iroquois, still another about the building of the Erie Canal, as well as ones on the rise of the steel and textile industries.  For all I remember, there may even have been chapters on working-class movements, strikes, the formation of labor unions, possibly something on the life of Emma Goldman[1] (though I doubt it).

      That I don't remember is largely the point here.  It was all crushingly boring; it seemed to have little relevance to anything that really mattered, to me or any of the other students forced to study this material.  Yet it never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with this, because all of high school -- or, I should say, the part devoted to formal education -- was boring.  Chemistry and Latin were no different from history, even though history was supposedly about "real life."  Yet none of us were deceived about what actually constituted real life.  Real life was your awkwardness in front of the opposite sex, your relations with your peers, your struggle to cope with what went on in your family.  And for many of us, fear played a large part in all of these dramas.  Yet none of this was in the history books; why (white) people bothered killing Indians or building canals remained a total mystery, and not a very interesting one at that.  History, no less than chemistry or Latin, was a set of abstractions, a bunch of formulas to be learned and later repeated.  Which is what we did.

      It will of course be argued that all of high school is a disaster, generally for everyone, and that my use of textbooks written for teenagers is an unfair example.  But is it really?  Pick up almost any history monograph today, including ones written by sophisticated or "sympathetic" historians, and you will generally confront the problem of reading about things that somehow fail to resonate with what is most familiar to you.  And what is that?  In a word, your emotions, or more broadly, your "spiritual" and psychic life.  These things are what your real life is about; they reflect the things that matter the most to you, for they are experienced in the body.  The human drama is first and foremost a somatic one.  How is it, then, that things such as emotions, or more generally the life of the body, gets left out of academic history?  How is it that historians remain oblivious to the anemia of their enterprise in its present form?  How is it that that which is most important in human life gets omitted from virtually all accounts of the past?

Berman continues: 

      Regardless of what a person visibly presents to the world, they have a secret life, one that is grounded in their emotions, their bodily relationship to the world and to themselves.  History has failed to tell us about these things because as a discipline it moves along the lines of external description.  The academic study of human life...proceeds on the assumption that only the visible is real....  Academic discourses generally lack the power to shock, to move the reader; which is to say, they lack the power to teach.  They fail to address the felt, visceral level of our being, and so possess an air of unreality.

He suggests that if history were written with the body holding the pen, instead of just the mind, it would read like a good novel but it wouldn't be invented. 

Of course, I am sure this will conjure up for some people the disturbing prospect of ending up on the other extreme, and distorting history with an emotionalized look.  Many of us are still constrained by the taboo against getting emotional about any subject of analysis, because "[I]f you do experience identification or resonance, you disqualify yourself as a professional observer or analyst." 

In his book, Berman points out that the bias against emotion has its origins in Western positivism:

      'Emotional' in the modern period has the same force as 'unreliable'; it means you are biased, that your judgment cannot be counted on. I suspect most of us would agree with this; I am only trying to suggest that our agreement is part of a culturally conditioned process.  Prior to 1600, lack of identification was regarded as strange.  Perception and cognition emerged primarily from the body, which is why, to borrow a term from the anthropologists, everything possessed manna, was alive. 

He continues:

       The heavy professionalization of history began in the 19th century.  Leopold von Ranke, the noted German historian, set the tone for historical research by asserting that the job of the historian was nothing more or less than to give a straight account of the facts; to report "what actually occurred"....  The triumph of the Scientific Revolution in the realm of historical understanding meant that things must never be examined except from the outside.  And this...is where we still are today.  The body and its feelings have no apparent relationship to the historical process; the 'inside' simply doesn't count.  History is, quite literally, a superficial discipline.

Thus Berman understood why high school was so boring -- because historical objectivity is not just boring,  "[I]t is also, quite simply, wrong, and on some level the body knows this.  This is why we found it difficult even to sit still in school.  That restlessness is the body's way of flashing us an essential message:  'This is bullshit,' the body is saying; 'don't listen to this.'"  He concludes brilliantly:  "History is made somatically; to be accurate, then, it should be written somatically."  Berman does not present a set formula of how this is to be done because he does not believe it can be carried out in a formulaic way, but he is convinced that a truly "objective" historical construction must include the somatic experience.

Another way of restating this idea of incorporating somatic experience into historical research might be that, instead of looking at history simply from the outside and intellectually analyzing it on the basis of information about events as if one were going to write a news article, one could try to understand what was going on underneath the surface and access the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.  People and societies see themselves in different ways in different historical moments.  One cannot study history without studying the evolution of culture, otherwise the manna is left out. 

We are essentially talking here about how human beings create their world from the internal image of it that they form in their minds.  Thus, to understand history, we cannot simply base ourselves on the external phenomena of human actions -- we have to go back to what is in the collective mind, to try to trace and understand the beliefs, the meanings -- in the last analysis, the images  -- that are the motor of human actions.  And these belief systems, structures of meaning and collective intentions are expressed in cultural configurations:  behavior codes, inner landscapes, ways of seeing, interpreting and being in the world.

There must be ways that an operative methodology can be developed in this direction, because history is a human construct, history is ours to reshape to make it useful for our evolution.  The reason that Berman’s proposal made such an impact on me was because it triggered an intuitive realization that the Philippines is a textbook case of the alienation he describes, with its bizarre history of serial colonization and abrupt and reiterated superimpositions of cultures and world visions that were diametrically opposed to each other.  First we were indigenous tribal groups practicing animism, then the Spanish arrived to impose Judaeo-Christian monotheism, destroy our cultural artifacts and ban our ancestral religions.  Later the Americans erased our Hispanic-Filipino memory and superimposed on top of our religious, pre-industrial mentality, their secularized, industrialized, consumerist culture and the dream of a new life in America.  It is no wonder then that Philippine history is taught in such a dissociated, alienating way.  There can be no doubt that such a state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue unaddressed.

However, I don’t think the idea of a somatic history would be to give ourselves permission to pass judgments of historical innocence and guilt (this is probably the main concern of those who instinctively object to including the emotions in the writing of history).  It would certainly be just as damaging for us to set to getting our history Right, to expose all crimes and fairly distribute blame. Then the bad people would finally be unveiled as such and punished with our collective repudiation, and the good people venerated and duly consecrated.  This would be futile and meaningless because there are as many documents and testimonies as there are arguments and justifications; but, even worse, it would reinforce the eternal problem of the divisions and resentments that inevitably lead to backlash.  

No, this isn’t the idea at all.

More important than achieving any kind of correct photograph of the past is for us to learn to observe ourselves as we have moved and changed throughout the different stages of our history, as we have evolved into a people.  I believe a somatic perspective is a requirement for learning to see this process.  Our past was constructed by the felt actions of our forebears as they gave responses to the emergencies of their times.  If we are able to recover from the mists of time the deepest intentions that motivated our grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, to act as they did, we will become psychically grounded in the past, it will come alive for us, and our forebears will return to accompany and give us counsel as we face our emergencies today. 

Anyone who reads about ancient Filipino tribal cultures will immediately grasp that ancestor worship was the center of our archaic community and religious life.  However, we often see this through the emotionally-disconnected filter of museum anthropology, and fail to feel what it means when one’s beloved and honored dead are a living presence.  And yet, we are nothing if not a deeply spiritual people; we cannot help but feel naturally connected to nature, to our superstitions and legends.  This aspect of our psychology, I believe, must be valued and incorporated into the activities of researching, writing and transmitting our history.  In other words, connecting with our "myth" and true personality as a people is another means to incorporate the somatic element into our historiography.

This, as far as achieving a somatic history.

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[1] Emma Goldman:  Russian-born labor agitator in the U.S. and lifelong exemplary activist (1869-1940).