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The Art Of Governing The Self And Others In The Christian Philippines, Pak Nung Wong D.Phil.

Journal of International and Global Studies

Through an ethnographic depiction of cultural creolization, this paper will detail the ways in which traditional Filipino values have been successfully mixing with and eventually lodging into the intersubjective landscape of Cagayan Valley, where the Chinese, Ibanag, Ilocano, and Itawes ethnic groups dwell. This cultural creolization process informs the ways in which the imagined social reciprocity between the self and others has been governed by a historically constituted power/knowledge system: the padrino system. This system is mainly composed of the symbiotic codes and social practices of (1) Catholicized ritual kinship and (2) the Tagalog ethics of “debt of gratitude” (utang …