The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See

subject into a knowing, civilized subject who understands how to behave—do not touch! do not run! do not shout!—in a museum. Progress through the museum—literally walking through the exhibitions—is part of the museum’s museological and pedagogical meta-discourse about taming the child.

      Knowledge Nullius and the Pivotal, Flexible Filipino

      How might we consider the white American academic’s act of headhunting as a corollary to the settler colonial fantasy of terra nullius, empty land by way of emptied land? I propose that the relationship between the American headhunter and the Filipino skull should be understood as part of a broader phenomenon that we might call “knowledge nullius,” which precedes and accompanies the logic of terra nullius. That is to say, the development of an accumulative epistemology depends on the precept of knowledge nullius. The investigation of the phenomenon of “accumulating the primitive” requires grappling with what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls an epistemological “possessiveness” on the part of the white settler.61 In her work on “White possession” and its circulation as a “regime of truth” in the Australian context of Aboriginal studies, Moreton-Robinson implies that the precept of terra nullius works hand in hand with the precept of “knowledge nullius.” According to Moreton-Robinson, the “White fantasy of terra nullius and the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty are fundamental to the narration of Australian identity and nation-building.”62 Moreton-Robinson further argues, “Whiteness operates through the racialized application of disciplinary knowledges and regulatory mechanisms, which function together to preclude recognition of Indigenous sovereignty or Indigenous knowledge.”63 These presuppositions about vacancy subtend the materiality and territoriality of settler colonial expansion—vacancy serves as a euphemism for evacuation—and they are intimately intertwined with the epistemological. While the study of settler colonialism has focused on the settler’s myth of terra nullius, we also need to examine knowledge nullius, and what Lorenzo Veracini has called the “idea that indigenous knowledge is ultimately unowned.”64 Note that there are two notions of “unownership” in play here that are connected but distinct: being unowned, which amounts to collective ownership, and being “not knowledge,” or empty of knowing. Knowledge does not count as such until it is individuated and appropriated.

      When it comes to knowledge nullius and the Philippines, the Philippine material collected by the University of Michigan served as a foundational “first” that subsequently lost its value and, for the most part, has been forgotten.65 As I discussed earlier, Guthe’s account of his fieldwork shows the workings of American knowledge nullius because the American anthropologist configured native shamans not as sources or bearers of local knowledge but rather as obstacles to the scientific preservation of knowledge. The University of Michigan’s herbarium provides another important example. The vast majority of the plant specimens from Steere’s foundational collection from the 1870s and 1880s were ferns, and a huge percentage of those were from the Philippines. Today, the University of Michigan’s herbarium owns a total of 1.7 million specimens, with several tens of thousands of specimens from the Philippines scattered throughout the collection. However, according to the herbarium’s current-day curator, only a tiny fraction of the Philippine collection actually is databased, and most is not easily accessible. The herbarium prioritizes what it calls its “New World” collection, and, massive as the Philippine collection is, it is classified as part of the less important “Old World” collection. The herbarium’s curator has admitted, “While we do plan to database all of our holdings including everything from the Old World, no plans are set yet for the Old World material, except for types.”66

      What is the purpose or value of this act of accumulation? What motivates the university to preserve a collection that it implicitly acknowledges is, at best, increasingly irrelevant? There are several ways to answer these questions, but I would argue that this archive is an expression of the way capitalism is innately colonial. As Steere’s Philippine fern collection exemplifies, the university’s archive and colonial capitalism, grounded as both are in the act of accumulating specimens from “primitive economies” around the world, transform the habit of “primitive accumulation” into power/knowledge. Note, however, how the professor’s habit of “primitive accumulation” constitutes the obverse of the capitalist ethic of abstention. This time, the “great old” professor’s act of collection, as opposed to the capitalist’s act of abstention, is made to be virtuous. For the sake of knowledge—knowledge for knowledge’s sake!—Steere heroically traveled and combed the world.

      But there is something distinct about how knowledge nullius works when it comes to the display of the Filipino in the United States. As a number of scholars have shown, the visual display of the Filipino in the U.S. context historically is entangled with war and conquest, especially the Philippine-American War.67 Oscar Campomanes has analyzed the work of “invisibilization” and amnesia achieved by the Filipino in American imperial culture.68 Nerissa Balce importantly extends these insights when she points out that the visibility of the Filipino depends on disappearing the conditions for the emergence of that visibility.69 Building upon earlier scholarship on U.S.-Philippines relations and visual culture like Benito Vergara’s book Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines (1995) and Laura Wexler’s book Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (2000), Balce has traced a transmedia history of the technology of surveillance in her 2016 book Body Parts of Empire: Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive. Balce brings to bear her twinned interest in the literary and the visual, and she shows that the concept of American surveillance emerges in novels of romantic colonial encounter set in the Philippines. Moreover, in the chapters that deal with American imperial photography in the Philippines, she argues that the science of the natural world was transformed into the science of militarized surveillance. These photographs then took on another life as they circulated in popular publications. Balce analyzes a range of the “objects left behind” as America transformed itself into a world power during and after its first transoceanic war, the Philippine-American War.70 She convincingly argues that the significance of this “shadow archive” of popular culture lies in its ability to hide the Filipino in plain sight.71

      For example, five years after the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippines,” about twenty million people visited the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, Missouri. With more than a thousand live Filipinos on display, the Philippine exhibit was the fair’s most popular attraction. But the spectacular nature of this imperial spectacle occluded the fact that in 1904 guerrilla warfare against the Americans was still ongoing in the Philippine countryside, even though the United States had declared the Philippine-American War officially over in 1902.72 The visual display of Filipinos temporally as well as ideologically coincided with the military conquest of the Philippines, a brutal and brutally forgotten war that scholars recently have described as genocidal according to even the most conservative definitions of genocide.73 Filipinos are subject to what could be called a primitivizing Orientalism that is specific to the conquest, colonization, and stereotyping of Filipinos.74 Whereas East Asians, particularly Chinese and Japanese, tend to be stereotyped in the United States as perpetually alien and inassimilable because they have too much culture, Filipinos do not have enough culture. Rather, Filipinos are associated with excess embodiment, which can be traced to phenomena such as the display of live Filipinos in a World’s Fair over a century ago and the display of a university’s collection today. Thus, the idea that empire is tightly bound up with vision holds true for Filipinos arguably more so than for any other colonized subjects of the United States. Furthermore, the highly visible representation of the Filipino in popular cultural forms in the early decades of the twentieth century enables the erasure of the circumstances of the Filipino’s visibility.

      This phenomenon plays out in today’s American museum, wherein the display of the Filipino coincides with the disappearance of the conditions and context for that visibility. When it comes to the Philippine exhibition at the UMMNH, the founding of anthropology requires forgetting both a genocidal war and the role that anthropology as a discipline played in establishing the conditions of possibility—the racial primitivity assigned to the Filipino—for that war. The visibility of the body coincides with and enacts the forgetting of its history: This process of radical dehistoricization is the form of knowledge nullius specific to the Filipino. Filipino