Mountain Perspectives: Histories of Flight and Resistance in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines

Philippines Lecture Series
Speaker: Stephanie Mawson, Research Fellow, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa
Moderator: James Robson, James C. Kralik, and Yunli Lou Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Harvard College Professor; Victor and William Fung Director, Asia Center, Harvard University
Presented online via Zoom on November 16, 2023
Abstract: Mountains sit at the heart of the story of colonization in the Philippines. As sites of autonomy, rebellion, and freedom, they came to define the physical limits of colonial territorial control and to symbolize the weaknesses of colonial power. Conceptualized as ‘zones of refuge’, spaces outside of colonial control offered indigenous people the option of withdrawing from colonial systems and continuing to practice their own traditional lifeways.
This paper explores the place of mountains and zones of refuge within complex dynamics of indigenous responses to Spanish colonization in the seventeenth century Philippines. The familiar story of Spanish colonization in the Philippines has centered on globalized trade, Pacific connections, and the inception of new colonial labor regimes and religious conversions. And yet, this view of the colonial period is partial, obscuring diverse histories of resistance, flight, evasion, conflict, and warfare from across the breadth of the Philippine archipelago. Adopting a mountain-perspective to re-examine the colonial period, I will focus on the widespread response by indigenous communities who escaped colonial settlements into uncontrolled, often mountainous spaces across Luzon and the Visayas.
Communities utilized upland spaces across the archipelago to evade the colonial state. Far from being passive resistance, autonomy was fiercely defended. Rugged and remote mountain geographies were deployed strategically by fugitive and autonomous indigenous communities to secure upland sites from colonial control. At the same time, they utilized various tactics to disrupt colonization in neighboring lowland regions, particularly through regular raiding. Despite regular attempts to invade these spaces, the Spanish simply lacked the military resources needed to overcome these barriers. Unable to gain control over large territories, some communities successfully maintained their autonomy throughout the entire colonial period into the twentieth century. Adopting the view from the mountains dramatically shifts our understanding of the colonial period in the Philippines, turning away from an emphasis on the establishment of Spanish power and institutional control towards the experience of local communities.
Biography: Stephanie Mawson is a research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa and a former research fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 2019, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar and a fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. As an historian of empire in maritime Southeast Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, her work focuses on questions of Indigenous agency, resistance, and sovereignty in the face of European imperial expansion, as well as global connections across Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds. She has published in leading historical journals including Past & Present, Ethnohistory, and The American Historical Review. Her book, Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Empire in the Seventeenth Century Philippines is out now with Cornell University Press.