The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen, in the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizations – which today are more and more supported by international commissions – can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer)
For local chieftain Panglima and most of his fellow Palaw’an tribesmen in Sitio Tabod – a hillside village five hours away from Puerto Princesa city in Palawan province – government officials and non-government organization (NGO) volunteers who claim to be interested in uplifting the community’s living conditions share a similar characteristic: they all simply want to do their jobs. In fact, in his community’s encounter and varied engagements with government agencies and NGOs for the past couple of decades, Panglima says he has become suspicious of these actors’ intentions and mere presence in the area. For instance, he remembers how one official from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) came to their community to hold a supposed consultative meeting regarding their claims to ancestral ownership of the territory and asked those who were present to sign their attendance on a blank sheet of paper. Panglima would later on discover that the DENR official used the “attendance sheet” to prove that the members of Sitio Tabod’s indigenous people community have given their approval for a private corporation to conduct mineral explorations in the area. Foreign and local NGOs are no different he claims – “like most politicians and state bureaucrats they would often come here offering us help, they’d bring medical supplies, then we have picture taking and then they’re gone. They all leave us after they have done what they came for.” Unlike trickster government agents, however, NGO workers according to the local chieftain are less menacing even if they too, in his assessment are quite “insincere … never showed interest in getting to know us, our lives, our families and our personal problems and we sense that.”
In contrast, Panglima claims he reserves the highest respect and esteem for the staff and volunteers of the social action commission (SAC) of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Vicariate of Puerto Princesa. Since 1995 this church-based organization has been helping the Palaw’ans of Sitio Tabod (and other indigenous communities in the province) in their application for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title – a document guaranteeing the indigenous community ownership of what they claim as ancestral territory threatened in recent years by the aggressive moves of the Philippine government to attract multinational mining corporations. When I asked Panglima what makes him trust the staff and volunteers of the SAC over government agents and secular NGO workers, he replied nonchalantly – “because they are from the Catholic church and we know that those from the church will not do anything to harm us. We’ve encountered many groups already… they all promised but then left, the SAC however, has stuck with us all these time.” I would later learn that although Panglima is a baptized Christian, he is not Roman Catholic by denomination.
Willy Tabor and Marlon Tabang of the Apostolic Vicariate of Puerto Princesa SAC accompanied me to the field observation in Sitio Tabod where I met Datu Panglima and his tribesmen. On the way to the site, we had to stop over at a local grocery store at the outskirts of Puerto Princesa to purchase food supplies. While surveying the sandwich spread section, Marlon asked Willy if they should buy peanut butter or mayonnaise. “Stay with the usual (mayonnaise) because they might not find peanut butter appealing because it’s new to their taste” Willy responded, slightly snickering, “you know how they wouldn’t easily eat something they’re not yet familiar with.” While paying for our purchases, Marlon and Willy also informed me that the Palaw’ans of Sitio Tabod would only drink coffee heavily diluted with water and sugar and that this was the way they were able to let the tribesmen talk about their conditions, family histories, local customs, myths and practices which the SAC staff transcribed and documented for the DENR in the community’s application for a CADT. According to Marlon the documentation process is both arduous but also entertaining, “once they start talking about their tribe, it could go on and on and the tribesmen would end up unearthing old stories, rumors and issues relevant to the community… even those we no longer need… and discussions would last until the next day.” In many occasions, especially in a community that does not document its social practices and traditions, SAC staff have served as bearers of memories and communal narratives that reinforce their relationship with members of the tribe.
After I conducted a focus group discussion with the community, Willy and Marlon spent the night until early dawn discussing and sharing stories with tribal leaders over bottles of gin and beer purchased at the village store. Topics ranged from livestock raising, family affairs of the village, the SAC-sponsored literacy training program, difficulties in gathering and harvesting from the surrounding forest to discussing issues about members of the community pawning segments of the land they gather food from to lowlanders in exchange for money as well as village political dynamics. Throughout the night, Willy, Marlon, Datu Panglima and a number of the village’s tribal council members rehearsed rituals and narratives of friendship and familiarity – imparting advices and recommendations in turn and sharing insights and observations. Over breakfast the next day, Panglima told me that these markers of “pagpapakatotoo” (sincerity) and “pakikisama sa komunidad”(solidarity) are the traits that he claims non-religious social workers, both government and non-government alike, have yet to exhibit to him and his people. Panglima insists – “basta taga-Simbahan, mapagkakatiwalaan” (if they are from the Church, they must be trustworthy).
Like Panglima and the Palaw’an tribesmen of Sitio Tabod, scholarship on civil society organizations and their contributions to social transformation, popular empowerment and democratization has evolved from an initial celebratory attitude towards a more tempered and critical evaluation of the impact and outcomes of NGO work with marginalized sectors (Coles 2004: 678; Hilhorst 2003:8-9; see also Fisher 1997 for an excellent review of the literature on what he calls the “politics and anti-politics of NGOs”). The continued deepening of what Stephen Gill (1997) calls a disciplinary market civilization organized on the principles of neoliberalism – state rollback, privatization, consumerism, open markets – casts a shadow of doubt on whether the celebrated space of civil society where NGOs traditionally operate could still constitute and preserve autonomous and collective freedom and self-realization – be it in the form of the liberally construed space of civic associations or the Gramscian version of counter-hegemonic struggles.
On the one hand, NGOs have been viewed as legitimizing the structural reorganization of the state from a social welfare orientation to one that shifts social welfare responsibility to non-state actors, including private corporations. Ronnie Lipschutz and Michael Rowe (2005) point for instance at the role of transnational NGOs and global civil society in legitimating the very fabric of neoliberal global governance by their focus on distributive rather than constitutive efforts. For Raymond Bryant (2003), NGOs in the Philippines participate in legitimizing “government at a distant” through logics of self-governance and empowerment that circumscribe organizational and mobilizational activities into overlapping state rationalities, while from a Gramscian standpoint, civil society organizations according to Eva Lotta-Hedman (2005) can also prolong crises of class hegemony rather than promote fractures and openings in dominant historic blocs as in the case of electoral reform groups that obscure the negotiations of class interests between political and economic elites. Rather than viewing the increasing autonomization of social sectors from state control, scholars in the past decade have pointed how this reality in fact, constitutes a new modality of power through which complementary logics of marketization and entrepreneurship advocated by state bureaucrats and transnational organizations, as well as global capital are localized, proliferated and reproduced (Rose and Miller 1992; Ferguson and Gupta 2002).
Religious institutions involved in NGO work and faith-based social movements have not been excluded from these skeptical judgments. Comaroff and Comaroff (2005) observe that messages of religious salvation have increasingly been articulated alongside promises of material progress and advancement and how their resurgence is a consequence of the despair and condition of hopelessness arising from the gross inequalities of the new global economy (2005). Studies on Pentecostalism and Evangelical charitable institutions have likewise demonstrated the deepening of a new ethic of capitalism that is no longer viewed in opposition to forms of spirituality that also seek to alleviate consequences of economic inequalities. In the United States, the Charitable Choice route to social welfare distribution has become a vehicle through which various religious congregations are folded into the logic of state-defined parameters of progress and modernity.
Similar observations have been made elsewhere. Using the case of Australia’s “charitable choice” regime, Voyce (2004) highlights how the religious discourse of enterprise theology as a political rationality has been instrumental in uniting a rather disparate and contradictory set of ideological perspectives on state-society relations. Primarily, through enterprise theology, the bias for religious and community values and social coherence which lies at the basis of religious welfare provision is able to converge with policy preferences of conservative economists and politicians while at the same time, comfortable with the neoliberal/market-based construction of poverty as a consequence of independent human moral choices. Voyce notes how constructs like “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor” which arise out of the reflections of agents involved in and are influential in the structuring of welfare provision regimes enable disciplinary and punitive measures against certain segments of the target constituency of welfare. The reverse of this condition is the legitimation of values of entrepreneurship, self-care, self-support and individual autonomy. In Australia’s economic policymaking history, enterprise theology has allowed policymakers to pursue privatization, labor market deregulation and tax-cuts, eschewing more structural, supply-side explanations to issues of poverty and dependency. Through the state’s contracting of religious organizations and agents for welfare provision and the dynamic interplay between religious rhetoric and economic policy preferences, secular economic provisions are “sacralized” while sacred activities are now rendered in communion with state and political rationalities. The state-in-society conceptualization of political autonomy – understood as a resource and a marker of power – makes little sense anymore as an indicator of either state or societal power since the logics that underpin the very success of the state’s or of society’s (in this case religious organization’s) activities interpenetrate each other vis-à-vis shared rationalities.
All these make Comaroff and Comaroff’s claim that civil society exists today as a “fetish” constituted along the cultural terrain and promises of millennial neoliberal capitalism is very convincing and useful in terms of cautioning against overly agentic and structurally deterministic approaches. Articulated together with mutations in political subjectivities and identities, the rise of occult economies, new religious movements with their gospels of material salvation, and renewed invocations of a more juridically ordered social life, the promise of civil society has taken on a mystical and spiritual dimension that for Comaroff and Comaroff demand an ethos of “critical distance” and “disbelief” while at the same time rejecting complete nihilism.
This critical distance, I believe, cannot however simply remain an attitude towards the subjects of one’s critical inquiry but must also guide one’s capability to be of distance from one’s received traditions and ways of perceiving and constructing reality. The question then is not just about the place of faith-based NGOs in the construction and reproduction of this dual fetishism of the state and civil society today but also: how scholarship on the role of religion in politics and society reproduces this defining characteristic of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and the possibilities of resistance. What paradigms and received wisdom in the literature may require revisiting to adequately capture this contemporary dynamics? What assumptions about the social world and religious agents do existing studies proceed from that frustrate a more complex and fuller understanding of the realities of engagements between religion and politics?
Foregrounding my investigation on an analysis of contemporary Philippine state-society relations as involved in a ritualistic performance of magic, excess and vulgarity (Comaroff and Comaroff; Mbembe) comparable with other states embedded in today’s cultural milieu of neoliberal capitalism, I wish to argue that the Catholic stress on a “presence” orientation to social work, an emphasis on the cultivation of the proper motivation among religious social workers and a conscious and unconscious rejection of teleological and magical aims expose and demystify the “salvific” promises of both civil society and the state, while at the same time calling into scrutiny even the efficacy of the “religious” sensibility.
I read narratives, life stories and personal testimonies of Catholic social workers as figuring in what may be a mode of inter-subjective engagement that privileges the coming-into-being of an alternative social order grounded in the contingency of the present and simultaneously anticipatory of a future, indeterminate, perhaps, messianic resolution/redemption. Recognition of this indeterminacy and to a certain extent, resignation into this indeterminate, undecided possibility conjures the image of a postcolonial subject akin to what Achille Mbembe has called homo ludens – man at play – occupying neither of the conventional binaries of a fully captured/fully resistant subject of state power. I then link this figure with Giorgio Agamben’s invitation to imagine a “politics-to-come” which is no longer inscribed in the logic of the political or biopolitical order, a subject which, in fact, can no longer be captured by a definitive distinction between sovereign politics and natural human life. The particular forms and specific practices located within civil society that may offer such a possibility remains, however, indeterminate and unclear and must be investigated and clarified with the present historical and ideological coordinates in mind, that is, acknowledging that what constitutes transgressive or complicit practices are invested with the interests of the dominant narrative itself. This demands critical work on the lenses that may prevent such recognition. It is this primary task that I turn to in the succeeding section of this essay.
The Question of the “Sacred/Religious” in Approaches to State-Society Relations
As indicated above, I take in this article, the production and performance of specific forms of religious subjectivity and engagement as constituting moments that problematize and complicate processes of state building and market deepening. However, I extend the investigation further by simultaneously pointing to the ways frameworks that study religious subjectivity inscribe the objects of their study within the project of the state and/or of the market and thus prevent the sacred/religious from being seen in a more complex way. Capturing what religion represents demands first an inquiry into how religion is represented in academic discourse.
My argument here is that existing frameworks and studies on church-state relations often figure in extending the dominating and fetishizing logics of the state, civil society and the market by: first, viewing the persistence of religion in public life as a consequence or manifestation of a failed “secularization” (and modernization) process.
These approaches naturalize the assumptions of the ideological project of “secularism” and its associated conceptions of what constitutes activities and dispositions proper to either the sacred or the secular. One must not forget that the assumption of securalism as a natural good and an ideal lies at the heart of the logic of the liberal modern state (Asad; Taylor). Interestingly, this approach is shared by liberal apologists for a neutral public sphere and Marxist polemicists against the alliance between transnational as well as domestic capitalist classes and religious elite institutions. Both approaches claim that religious subjects are overpowered by mythical and illusory norms that prevent them from arguing and participating in public life from a rational or revolutionary perspective. Here, the sacred is represented as incapable of asserting its own capacity to restructure the world according to its own narratives and inhibits a view that sees in this ability some form of political agency rather than as mere consequence of supernatural forces. A political form of subjectivity unable to accept and live in accordance to this stringent division between rarefied constructs of the sacred and the secular is thus pathologized and rendered as devoid of agency.
This may perhaps explain why interventions by critics of colonial history find religious disciplinary institutions, on the one hand, as extensions of the colonial regimes that aided in the legitimization of the “submission” of natives to the colonial state apparatus (Rafael), while, those who sympathize with religion on the other hand, tend to valorize religious discursive practices that transgress or at least, occupy the margins of authorized and doctrinal practices (Ileto; Cannell) that empowered (and continue to do so) subversive projects supposedly able to resist the nationalistic ambitions of revolutionary elites and the resulting disciplines of the postcolonial nation-state. Catechetical practices, confessional regimes and liturgical spectacles are in this light are taken to be moments that bind the converted native into the rule of colonial officials (Mojares) and their ecclesiastical counterparts and as such criticism of these discursive practices signify liberation from if not a critique of colonial and postcolonial rationality.
These trenchant criticisms of religious colonial institutions – of the “frailocracy” and the “magic of religion” – as well as the lasting effects of religious authorities in postcolonial times – merely repeat however the categorical and discursive opposition between the “true religion” sanctioned by colonial state-ecclesiastical authorities and the “false religion” practiced by the natives – shamanism, idol worship, etc – which Asad notes was the manner by which encounters between the Western world and the non-Western world procured the ossification of the realms of the “religious” and the “natural”. One may then find a transposition of the collaboration between religion and the colonial state in the efforts of postcolonial critics of religion to define and differentiate the proper subjectivity and place of the religious in the context of public life. If in the former historical moment, the collaboration was between religion and colonialism, in the latter, the collaboration is between neoliberal capitalism and postcolonial criticism. Just as colonial ecclesiastic discipline produced diverse biopolitical and governmental rationalities and apparatuses of control over the body, the self and the spirit, all meant to define the properly religious (that is, Christian) subject (as opposed to the pagan), the same can be found now in attempts to characterize from the vantage point of the liberal secular nation-state what may be properly and fitting for religious individuals within the dominant order of global neoliberalism. But perhaps, another manner by which critics of colonial history reify the subject of their criticism – the colonial association with religion – lies in their totalizing narratives of the colonial state-religious institution relationship. While much historical and archival research needs to be done, a non-totalistic view of the relationship may involve unsettling dominant narratives where religious elites and hierarchies are merely portrayed as fixed and automatic appendages of the colonial regime. These historiographic (if not, nationalistic hagiographic) representations denounce too quickly religious versions of colonial history and announce to rashly and rather conceitedly a more objective and non-ideological account of history.
The second way representations of religion rehearse state/market power is by immediately characterizing religious elites and hierarchies (or segments therof) as “conservative”, “reactionary” or “disconnected from the lives of their constituents” while celebrating the progressiveness, openness and rootedness of non-institutional, grassroots and popular practices of religiosity. Approaches, including those that see in religion a value in public life, idealize a form of religious subjectivity that takes the source of his or her belief and eventual mode of public engagement not from the specific rigors of his or her religious institution but from one’s own pure and autonomous motivations. Such an approach misreads what Alfred Stepan calls the “multivocality” of religious voices by viewing these competing images of the Catholic Church as signifying discursive discontinuities within the established religious institution. By following this trajectory, representations of religious subjectivity fail to consider the probability that differences in religious engagement in public life may not necessarily spell dissonance or disconnection from doctrinal and institutional modes of belief or engagement but may in fact be recognized and produced by the ecclesial structure of the religious institution itself. Ultimately, it fails to pay attention to the disciplinary rationalities animating what may be perceived as non-doctrinal or non-institutional that are intimately, if not, subtly woven into authoritative discourses. In this case, the critique of religious subjectivity falls into the trap of mere criticism, as Karl Marx observed in the Young Hegelians and in Feuerbach.
In Public Religions in the Modern World, the sociologist Jose Casanova distinguished the process of secularization as an undeniable and validated reality of contemporary modernity from secularism as the ideological trope and project of modernity. For Casanova, adopting an ideological and methodological stance of secularism prevents scholars from appreciating how religious actors today continue to exist and inscribe them into assessments that fail to recognize them as social actors rather than as mere aberrations in the continuing unfurling and progression of the modern world. From a descriptive secularization narrative, Casanova thus points to the increasing differentiation and specialization of contemporary social life which even religious institutions have come to accept in time. Yet this same acknowledgment of specialization did not prohibit and should not be viewed as prohibiting religious institutions from engaging in public life primarily because an aspect of the specialized realm of religious membership is played out in a citizen’s public duties and obligations. The problem with the ideological project of secularism as elucidated by Talal Asad lies in its conceptualization of religion as either occupying a symbolic realm disconnected from broader societal and historical processes or a mythical structure that subjects its constituents into dominating logics and deprives them of agency. For Asad, both accounts of religion and the sacred are infected by the interested aims of modernity itself and as such must be taken not for the truth that they are supposed to embody about religious actors possessed by religion but as their ontological being defined by modernity in itself. This mode of representing the sacred effectively silences the sacred as a representing subject and imputes in it characteristics extraneous to its phenomenal experience.
The stakes are high for modernity in depicting the religious along the lines indicated above. Foremost, only by relegating religion to the realm of the symbolic can modernity push religion into the private sphere and as such be bracketed out of other dimensions of human life. In doing so, modernity and its disciplines can now construct the differentiated spheres of the secular and the sacred that it idealizes and aspires for. Secondly, it is only by rendering religion as mythical and illusory can modernity deny it of vitality and thus ultimately utilize it for its own purpose of contrasting its logic of rationality with whatever rationality possessed by religion. When one speaks then of the irrationality of religion one needs to ask whether such a categorization is of one’s own or whether such a portrayal proceeds from a naturalized description of religion by the imaginary of modernity.
In this way, it becomes easy to depict religion as either supporting or derailing processes associated with modernity, capitalism or democratization, rendering one’s image of religion coterminous with the dominant vocabulary of modernity, capitalism or democratization. But what is at stake for modernity in relegating religion in the realm of the symbolic and mythical? Certainly not simply to dispossess it of its legitimacy and transfer such legitimacy to the structures of modern life, primarily the state, since in doing so, one simplistically reduces modernity as a mere absence of explicit and institutionalized religion and its trasnferrance into the realm of the secular.
This does not mean that religion or the sacred can be encountered in some pure and immaculate way. On the contrary, only by refusing these ideologically inflected terms set down by modernity can religion be viewed again as a historical reality – that is, as capable of actualizing itself and realizing its aims by defining the secular from its own tradition and interests. What secularists tend to do is to render religion in the abstract, that is as a fixed and unchanging reality and remove it from the lived experience of its constituents. On the other hand by refusing the assumptions and aspirations of modernity one can return to religion as it is lived by the ones who experience it. From the standpoint of a critically engaged and more ethical form of social inquiry and research, I suppose that only by exposing the aims and the stakes of modernity in casting religion according to the present terms it has constructed it can one define and finally begin to talk about the social effects of religion in a more truthful way. Otherwise, one will only be involved in looking for and ascribing religious causes to what perhaps may not be religious factors and as such not really contributing to a fuller and more complex understanding of phenomena in question. Only by asking how religion defines the world it engages in rather than proceeding from an ossified understanding of religion and then asking how religion might contribute or not contribute to the world it engages can one understand the dynamics of religion as a lived experience. This means taking the religious beyond the realm of culture and redefining it as a system of power relations that create the conditions for experience and thought through which the religious subject moves and organizes reality. Doing so allows one to view performances of religious subjectivity as world-enacting rather than simplistically theorizing them along the lines of resistance or co-optation.
Performing Social and Charitable Action
Daniel Levine (1981) argues that religion should be understood “as a source of guiding concepts and principles instead of merely subsuming religious phenomena under secular rubrics.” From this perspective, the self-images of the church are taken to be the explanatory variables of the way its acts in society. This requires a “working out from religious concepts, rather than in from sociopolitical ones” because: “Catholic elites simply do not consider issues in strictly social or political terms. Instead their answers are couched in religious concepts and metaphors, which flow from their understanding of the requirements of religious faith, their view of the Church as an institution, and their conclusions about its proper relation to society at large – not from purely social analysis alone (ibid: 12).” Levine’s premise is that “religious positions inevitably have temporal consequences, and temporal problems have an impact on the lives of believers” (ibid: 13), albeit the impact of the church on society has to be investigated beyond what is contained in the preaching, exhortation and positions of its leaders.
Viewing these linguistic spaces/textualities as the primary site where state logic is deepened and where state rationalities are unfolded but are also possibly contested and upset through embodied practices and discursive regimes seeks to displace the literature’s focus on establishing deterministic causal relations in making sense of church-state partnerships.
In what follows, I argue that
a. the deployment of the concept of “competence” to describe what activities and forms of relations between these activities properly fall within the jurisdiction of the spheres of the State, civil society, the market and the Church;
b. the insistence of a Catholic imperative towards social action and charity as a “duty”; and
c. the elaboration of an anthropological understanding of man from the perspective of “totality”
serve to 1) legitimize and provide the discursive field of meanings to the practices of charitable/social action workers; 2) define the preferences of religious actors and their positions within the order of the church they operate as well as establish their position within the larger social field; and 3) provide religious actors with the space in which their agency can be exercised through the appropriation and deployment of the very disciplinary mechanisms that construct their identities/subjectivities.
Charity’s Competence
In my interviews with the different directors, volunteers and staff of social action centers in the dioceses of San Fernando, Davao, Caloocan, and the apostolic vicariate of Puerto Princesa, the justification for Church-State partnerships is consistently grounded on the conviction that while the spheres of the Church and the State are differentiated by functions and competencies, they nonetheless share a common goal of providing service to those in need. Functional and competence differentiation in this sense, instead of foreclosing the possibility of partnerships, enables the very reason for such. When describing state agents and institutions for instance, social action volunteers have in common observed that most state agents and even politicians claim that the Church’s social action volunteers are more capable in providing service delivery than government workers because politicians and state institutions know that when the Church conducts its activities it does so effectively, efficiently and without the possibility of corruption and misuse of resources. It is also not uncommon for social action workers to exclaim that State agents, if they are really interested in doing their jobs, only want “to get it done rather than doing it well!” – the latter they argue is something that they and not the State agents provide the target constituencies of social service delivery. According to Fr. Rico Enriquez of the Archdiocese of Davao Social Action Center, partnership with Church agents is more than welcome for politicians because it provides their projects with political legitimacy and increases trust in state institutions, yet for Church social action workers, the meaning of the partnership is less a matter of political legitimacy than a fulfillment of a religious mandate and of duty. Thus, the linguistic deployment of competence as a justification for Church-State engagement sanctions a myriad of possible activities but also provides the frame through which competing meanings arise and instantiates a space in which participants negotiate the meanings of their respective actions and decisions. Within this space, the conceptual separation of the Church and the State inevitably collapses but is at the same time reinforced.
The image that SAC volunteers deploy is an interesting example: an image of complementary institutions that need each other to fulfill their individual social missions and roles. The utilitarian political goals of the State and its agents are thus concealed in the deployment of this discourse of competence. Hence, when asked whether they are bothered by the possibility that their partnerships with state agents can be used to make certain political institutions or actors appear favorably to constituents or to other social sectors, SAC volunteers claim that they “don’t mind at all” since “the task of providing service is more effectively undertaken anyway.” While SAC volunteers that I have interviewed and talked to recognize the dangers that their efforts are used by politicians, they argue that what is more important is that the services are delivered and the beneficiaries receive what they need, since this is the mandate of their institution and their competence, not the political consequences of what they do with State actors. Take for instance Sister Maria Gaudicas, a nun of the Daughters of St. Paul and Director of Caritas Davao who claimed that there is nothing wrong with asking for donations from politicians like former Davao province congressional representative Prospero Nograles – “People say he’s corrupt. But for us in the institution, he gives whenever we need something. Anyway, the money that he gives us is from taxpayer’s money. We become channels of giving it back to the taxpayers, especially to those who are in need.” The absence of political remorse here is certainly easy to identify as indicative of Sister Gaudicas’s naïvette in terms of political relationships but given that Catholic social teaching forms the minds of its religious actors along the lines of competence and not in terms of political efficacy, Sister Gaudicas’s statement is hardly surprising and in fact representative of a general tendency. Here the ability to resist political co-optation lies not in the effects of State-Church partnerships but rather in the meaning that the participants give these relationships. Thus, for SAC volunteers, they are even sought after by politicians themselves and preferred by government agencies because they do their tasks properly and have the competency to undertake certain endeavors that can possibly be subjected to corrupt practices when devolved instead to political institutions. Many of the SAC volunteers then that I have interviewed are not concerned with the dangers or threats of being co-opted precisely because they find nothing wrong with it since the activity that demands their partnership is an activity that lies within their competence as social action workers.
The discourse on competence is also evident in the way religious agents construe State regulation. Take for example this statement by Antonio Abadilla of the SAC of the Apostolic Vicariate of Puerto Princesa: “even if these bureaucratic processes may in fact demand a lot of work on our part – such as documentation and other forms of paper work – they are in fact necessary not only because it is the duty of the government to actually oversee the activities that fall within its institutional jurisdiction but more importantly because they are also mechanisms that help us do our jobs and our tasks better.” In Antonio’s view, the recognition that the State possesses the competence – brought about by its role in the promotion of the common good through the regulation of activities within its domain – is sufficient enough to transcend whatever institutional tradeoffs partnerships with State agencies may entail.
What my SAC informants do not agree with is the interference of State or political agents in the manner with which they conduct their activities, especially their social advocacies. While there is recognition that State interference as a result of political differences is absolutely inappropriate and in fact violates the integrity of the religious organization, anxiety over institutional autonomy is less articulated in the conventional form of separation of the Church and of the State, than in the defense of differences in capabilities. Here, competence is again invoked: “Of course, the government cannot tell us how to do things. We have our own way of conducting our activities and this is within the tradition of Catholic social teaching. In the same way, we do not also impose our priorities to the government. That is their job. Our job is simply to make sure that their priorities which they have offered to us for partnership work gets delivered in the manner that is faithful to our own vision and ways of doing things.” The articulation of the separation of Church and State by employing the language of competence over a rigid liberal framework of mutually exclusive social spheres demarcated by the principle of rights, SAC volunteers legitimize mutual cooperation without reducing the relationship into a priori and predetermined narratives and calls for closer investigation into the dynamics of the conditions that allow these articulatory practices to subvert crystallized thought categories. So far, according to all of my SAC informants, there have been no instances yet when the State or a politician with whom they are engaged with in a formal or informal partnership have particularly interfered. In fact, again, the recognition that religious organizations like SAC have developed a more beneficiary-sensitive approach to the delivery of social services and as such have gained an image of competency in the eyes of political institutions prevents the very intrusion of State actors into the domain of religious activities. Abadilla adds: “They know that we are the Church and the Church never does things against any ethical principle of dealing with beneficiaries.” Antonio’s superior, Fr. Pipes Torre Campo of the Apostolic Vicariate of Puerto Princesa in Palawan province, asserts with such potency: “We are the Church! Enough said.” In this way, the deployment of the concept of competence is also a way in which the SAC volunteers are able to criticize State/government institutional partnerships. Further, he observes that “the government leaves us alone, they are not consistent with their own activities.” This is corroborated in my interviews with partner State agencies of the different social action centers studied here. According to one official of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, with whom a number of diocesan social action centers have one kind of partnership or another, “Once we have signed a memorandum of partnership, we allow the religious organization to operate on its own because we know that they have the necessary tools and human resources for the effective delivery of the social services. Our only job is to audit their financial reports and to demand accomplishment reports so we can evaluate the effectivity of the partnership and thus make our institution more responsive as well.”
The discourse of competence is also a performed discourse, embodied by the social action worker and recognized by the beneficiaries of SAC endeavors. In a mountain village in Puerto Princesa city in Palawan province, populated mostly by the indigenous Palaw’an tribe, the social action volunteers are not just viewed as potential benefactors, they also exercise some kind of expert-authority in the community by virtue of their perceived competence in different fields. SAC staff and volunteers are seen as bearers of knowledge that can possibly help in community efforts. Upon arrival, the first thing that one villager asked Marlon Tabang, a SAC staffer from the Apostolic Vicariate of Puerto Princesa was: “Sir Marlon, maybe you can teach us one of these days to develop a new source of livelihood. The soap making technique that you taught us before was really effective and helped us generate some source of money.” During the visit, San Pedro inquired about the hog that the SAC donated to the community to be raised and gave suggestions on how to properly feed the livestock.
Similarly, during my visit to another village, this time an Aeata tribal community in the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of San Fernando in Pampanga province, it was observable that Marilen dela Cruz of the Archdiocesan SAC is not just looked up to in the community as a charitable worker, she is also an expert-authority in matters of financial literacy and funds administration, livestock rearing, community organizing and at the same time a link with the social action center office. In this community, the primary program of the SAC is the strengthening of a five-year old community cooperative which the villagers see as an important source of credit and aid in their livelihood activities. During the visit, dela Cruz inspected the cooperative office and immediately suggested to the secretary of the cooperative possible changes in the structure to make it more useable and convenient for the cooperative members. During the focus group discussion that I conducted with members of the cooperative and the interviews with non-members, it was clear that dela Cruz is highly esteemed not just because she was a representative of the Church but because she had shown capability to organize the community and bring benefits to the village. According to one Aeta tribal leader – “before when we would trade our gabi to market vendors they would usually price it very low – as low as one peso per bundle. Of course we had no idea how much our products really cost. We were easily fooled and “naiisahan” (tricked). But when the SAC started working in our community, they taught us how to negotiate correctly and informed us the real value of our products. Now we can confidently haggle and bargain with market vendors. With the cooperative installed, we even have more bargaining powers since we are now able to go direct to the market and we avoid the middleman who usually comes at the foot of this hill to bring our goods down.” During one of my visits to the village, dela Cruz called for a cooperative meeting and facilitated the revision of rules and regulations governing the cooperative’s members. At the end of almost four hour meeting, the officers of the cooperative decided to hold elections for new officers in the next week and the group demanded that dela Cruz facilitate too the election of the new board of officers since “she is the only one capable of making members listen to each other and respect each other’s opinion” so much so that her absence from the meeting “can lead to personalistic rivalries and may even cause people in the community to become enemies with each other because there is no expert and capable person that can rein in on the emotions and sentiments of the cooperative members.” During one of those gatherings that I was able to fortunately attend and participate in, Panglima – the village chief of the Palaw’an village would always ask Marlon Tabang questions like: “what did we say again how these things are done in our culture before?” or “who again are the parents of this and this member of the village?” These things may appear trivial but they highlight how the notion that SAC staff and volunteers by virtue of their being competent become integrated and intimately at that within the social and even cultural relations of the community they participate in. The discourse of competence and its embodiment within the social action worker as a bearer of knowledge is however not limited to expertise. Competence can also means, the ability to become a trustworthy bearer of intimate knowledge about the community being serviced by the religious organization. SAC volunteers are constantly being asked to answer questions not related to their main task but questions that presuppose a level of comfortable intimacy such as what to do with “petty differences” between members of the community.
This dual understanding of competence – expertise and intimacy – provides a point of comparison that SAC beneficiaries themselves use to contrast Catholic SAC volunteers and the kind of work they do with those initiated and conducted by the State its agents. Statements from partner communities like – “with people from the SAC we are always sure that our benefit is really their interest and not just the attainment of their specific goals, unlike other non-governmental organizations who only come here and ask us to sign their attendance sheets and receipts of donations but never really understand our social situation” also serve to reinforce the very notion that SAC staff are indeed bearers of a form of competency that is specific to their mission and their roles as plenipotentiaries of the Church.
The deployment of competence leads to three consequences that arise out of the performance of Catholic charity: first, by characterizing what falls within the spheres according to the capability each can satisfy and achieve, Church agents transcend and evade questions of political affiliation and replaced by concerns of capacity building and enhancement; second, the differentiation of social spheres along the lines of competence, enables Catholic social thought to sanction a myriad of possibilities for the progressive development and cultivation of disciplinary mechanisms, bodies of knowledge and techniques of charity that contribute to the proper performance of the said competency; and third the differentiation of these social spheres along the line of competency shifts emphasis from consequences to the very performances of the competency laid out to be proper for each.
Charity as a Duty
The second way in which religious agents involved in the delivery of social services and charity work linguistically construct the construct the practice of social action and charity is by expressing it as a matter of Christian duty.
The notion that as Christians one has the duty to help others “and to find avenues in which one can help others and in the process help oneself as well” is a pervasive answer among many of the SAC volunteers that I have interviewed when asked why they are employed or why they volunteer in their respective SACs. The “sense of duty” which animates the sensibilities of SAC workers serves to justify their relationship with the State: “if the government invites us to provide services that may help in the performance of our duty as a Christian organization, then who are we to say no to this invitation?” Similarly, “You can say that these things we’re doing actually reflect that the government has failed in it fundamental duties to protect and promote the dignity of its citizens. Yet, even if, we say, the State is fully capable of doing these on its own, we will still continue our charitable practices and will still engage in partnerships with the State in the same level that we do now because this is demanded by our faith, this is demanded by Catholic social teaching.” A number of SAC staff actually articulated that they find the sense of “autonomy erosion” somewhat ridiculous because for them: “our very capacity to serve others – which is a matter of our duty – isn’t that already a marker that we are an autonomous organization?” The invocation of the discourse of Christian duty here, adds another layer of meaning – together with the discourse of competence – that SAC workers can deploy and appropriate when justifying their relations with the State. The SAC worker’s self-understanding of his or her duty provides him or her with a set of expectations on working with the State and government agencies. Because they see themselves as operating from the framework of Christian duty, SAC staff like Doreen Sanchez argues that she knows that “government agents and politicians do not work like us.” When asked to elaborate what she meant by this, she smilingly replied: “well for one, they are not there on time when you are invited to a meeting, sometimes they have no idea what the projects are or even about the situation. Me? Before going to a meeting with government agents, I usually prepare myself to be able to brief them with the necessary information and data.” Here, duty redefines the meaning that the relationship between the State and the Church and in doing so, shapes the way religious agents act within the established field of relationality. As individuals bound by duty, SAC staff claim that they are supposed to attend to those who come in need and to identify where “this duty should take us demands vigilance on our part. It requires us to be ready to go where we are needed and to do certain things whose consequences we may not really understand fully” as Marlon Tabang put it, rather succinctly. Marleen dela Cruz says: “as a SAC worker, you must be ready to sacrifice your comfort – even ethical comfort zones – if money is needed to support the work of the Church, and because it is our duty to help, then sometimes we may need to develop partnerships with politicians.” This kind of attitude is supported by the notion that “whatever we do, whether it is in cooperation with the State or other organizations, have a different meaning for us that is distinct from what they think we are doing – for us, we are not only performing a function or a job – which is most of the times how other people see their roles in social services – but rather, helping build the kingdom of God on earth. This very motivation gives our partnerships a different meaning.” For SAC workers then, efforts of the government or the State to link with religious organizations are not efforts to co-opt them or to influence their way of thinking but is reflective of the State’s recognition of their ability to conduct social service delivery because “our very duty compels us to really deliver. And not just in a selective way. As Catholic SAC workers, in contrast with NGOs and other faith-based groups engaged in a similar way, we do not exclude beneficiaries from our activities. Since our intention is not really to make people believe in our ideology or our political plan, or as some religious groups do, to proselytize, but rather to make sure that our duty in providing help to the poor is met, we think that the State or politicians recognize that their money or their services are best coursed through us.” Partnership with State agencies then are framed not simply from an organizational perspective but from the discursive understanding and reproduction of the notion that the Catholic social action worker and offices must be able to operate from an all-inclusive frame and manner of engaging with their constituents and beneficiaries. This discursive lens then conceals or at least inhibits from being problematized the political character that the partnership may also carry with it, since what is significant for the SAC worker is the performance of Christian duty.
At the same time, the appeal to “we are doing our God-mandated duty”, provides the SAC worker a rationality with which to negotiate State regulation and to make sense of it in the face of possible antagonism from the State: “for me, the State cannot possibly claim to have a say in what we do or the government cannot have any reason at all to manage our affairs, simply because there’s nothing wrong with what we do – we are complying with our duty to serve the people.” In the context then of potential conflict with the State, the discourse of duty intervenes and shapes, according to my informants, not just SAC activities but also the way SAC workers understand how State agencies perceive these activities: “When we differ say for instance with local or national government agencies, we do so not simply to advance a political or a social advocacy, but because of our duty. I think the government and our partner politicians understand this as well. They know, even in the context of our partnerships, that we have a specific duty to fulfill and that is the duty of becoming a witness of the Gospel of Christ and its message. When we condemn therefore the government or its politicians, they are most likely to respect us because they know our duty. Their duty is also different – their duty is to advance their political goals. At the end, we are all just doing our duties.” Thus according to an officer in Davao’s SAC, their engagement with the city government in efforts to reduce criminality and the local Church’s strong condemnation of alleged “summary extrajudicial executions” conducted by the city’s feared “vigilantes” are not diametrically opposed. For her, they complement each other because on the one hand, issuances of strong statements against perceived participation of the government in these vigilantes-led killings are a manifestation of the Church’s duty to condemn the destruction of human life, and on the other hand, their engagement with police authorities and the city council in the education, feeding and Catechesis of Davao street children and homeless families driven by poverty to live in the streets is a concretization of the Church’s duty to promote the dignity of human life. The resolution of discordant logics or intentions between State agents and SAC workers vis-à-vis the discourse of duty is also manifested in the case of Puerto Princesa’s SAC which has been involved for 15 years with the government in the mapping of ancestral domain territories of indigenous Palaw’an tribes residing in these areas. According to Marlon Tabang: “we all know that the government is really not serious in pursuing these activities – they don’t even give enough funding for it, and we are also aware that our partnerships will not be used for the purpose that we want. But it is nonetheless our duty to help the Palaw’an people. At least, by being partners with the government, we are also able to generate data and information that can be used in the future.”
Duty here is deployed in a manner that is conceptually different from competence because as one of my informants put it: “in responding and fulfilling the Christian duty to help, it is not acceptable to say – ‘wait, I’m not fully equipped to do this task’ – one has to be ready to serve in the face of an urgent need that demands immediate response.” Duty thus, enriches the notion that SAC workers possess the competence to conduct their specific activities but at the same time makes its development of secondary importance since “at the end of the day, what really matters is that you have helped the people and addressed their needs.” Competence when subsumed within the demands of Christian duty is thus viewed not just as possessing any inherent circular logic that goes back to itself in its very performance but is also a fulfillment of a deeper demand and obligation. Yet the concept of duty inhibits the SAC worker from self-criticizing the processes or framework that help in the attainment of the duty. This is not to say that SAC workers operate on a discursive framework of “the end justifies the means” but rather, that they are unable to question the means because these means are usually seen as innocuous and value-neutral. Here disciplinary mechanisms that are usually viewed in the literature on critical studies as elaborating and deepening the control of certain ideological or political programs are rendered ambivalent in character. Take for example the “financialization” or “medicalization” or “circumscription of native bodies into logics of biopolitical notions of care” of certain aspects of SAC work such as the establishment of cooperatives that require the instruction of beneficiary communities in the language of accounting procedures, money matters and fund raising or the introduction of proper sanitation technologies in mountainous territories. In the overlap of the discourses of competence and duty, these processes are extricated of any inherent “evil” value – “they’re not necessarily bad, these modern ways of doing things” exclaimed one Aeta leader during one of my interviews, “because they help us in our day to day activities and plan our future lives. While we still view with sentimentality and fascination the old ways, like ancient practices of ‘defecating’ where we just cover our excrement with the soil, we have come to realize that these are unhealthy practices that lead to sicknesses and death in our communities.” Since the important task is to fulfill the duty of helping these communities prevent sicknesses, aid in their financial transactions, and ultimately help themselves, the techniques utilized to achieve these goals are seldom held into account or even noticed as carrying within them “political” or at least “ideological” imperatives.
The performance of duty as compared to competence also sanctions different ways of doing things: “it can mean just your presence, or your time, or your attention, or just to give them the feeling that someone is listening to them” as Doreen Sanchez says. What constitutes this specifically Christian duty also determines and ranks the priorities of social action apostolates. When I inquired why there are no political education components to how they define social action beyond electoral or voter’s education, Marlon Tabang said: “While we recognize the importance of teaching politics to our communities, this is usually superseded by the more pressing duty of giving them food or giving them employment. Without this, it is very difficult to organize any community. They need to see that there’s something for them – for their hungry stomachs and for their industry.” Here, duty is not just an injunction that is articulated from the hierarchy of the Church but is rather also localized by the peculiar dynamics of community organizing. While SAC workers recognize their capacity for politically mobilizing and conscienticizing their beneficiaries, the discourse of duty deflects this in favor of the demands of the communities themselves. As the director of the SAC of the diocese of Novaliches put it, “we usually instruct our volunteers and our staff to put the community’s needs first. While there are of course some priorities which we ourselves want to pursue, it is also our duty to listen first and understand what it is that the community needs.” According to him, since it is the duty of the SAC worker to truly serve the needs of their beneficiaries, they must “not bring anything to the community but the desire to serve. This is what we call the ethic of stewardship – for us to be mere facilitators of these communities and not to impose on them what we want them to become.” What constitutes duty then is not determined a priori but is constituted in the very conduct itself of social action. In the process then of the SAC worker’s encounter with their particular communities, the officially defined bounds of Christian duty can lead to different practical appropriations as well as negotiations that occur during or after the conduct of charity or social action itself. Echoing Tabang’s claim: “Sometimes what they need is not instruction on jobs, or education, or any other variable that a template on social work may provide us with. Sometimes the need that must be addressed first is very basic: food, shelter, clothing, clean water, sanitation. It is not just us who determine that these are their fundamental needs – they are very self-evident and the people themselves ask us to help them with these first and foremost.” A social action worker in Davao also resonates the same sentiment: “While we want to address the political aspect of the vigilante killings (in Davao), we also recognize that the factors that give rise to it are actually deep and very basic – why are there small crimes in the city and why are the vigilantes there? It’s not just because the police has failed or because the politicians want to do it, it’s primarily because of poverty and the lack of basic services and physical security such as stable housing conditions for the poor that really give rise to it. These, we have the competence to address, this is our duty first and foremost.” Thus the notion of charity and social action as duties establishes too the sets of skills that SAC workers must possess and the sets of skills that may be irrelevant in their conduct such as: “preaching, delivering sermons, and those things that priests do we really don’t need. What is simply asked of us is the sincerity of heart to listen, to serve and to be with our beneficiaries.” In the face of opposition from communities, the discourse of duty helps SAC workers to strengthen their resolve to continue with their efforts: “when some community members reject us, we persist, even if we are vilified by some. Not so much because we want to show them that we are right, but because it is our duty to alleviate their conditions. This and nothing else.”
During my visits and participant observation in the Diocese of Kalookan, the SAC office was in the thick of preparing a database of activities on social action and charity work within the Diocese that the bishop – Deogracias Yniguez would be presenting on his ad limina visit to Rome with the Pope. Susan Fernandez – the lay director the office has asked the various working committees and volunteers to come up with quantitative data documenting their activities by going back to their respective areas/fields. Fernandez’ observation is very interesting: “In the many and more immediate needs and duties that we all have to attend and provide our communities with, we seldom find the time to document our activities. Like for instance, when we conduct feeding programs, we are at times unable to count the number of participating beneficiaries, sometimes even the dates are contradicting! You know us, it’s not the number of people that we are able to serve, we don’t count that, we don’t count what we give, what’s important for us, is the fact that we have fulfilled our duties to our respective communities. This is what separates us from other non-governmental organizations – many of them are very concerned with knowing how much they have helped and using it to advertise or gratify themselves. We’re not concerned with that here.” When viewed from the demand of duty, the conduct of essential processes then for organizational development as well as the meaning that SAC workers invest on them is disembedded from their intended meaning or purpose.
Araceli Fernandez also appealed to the concept of duty when she narrated to me how she has managed to work with the SAC of San Fernando for a very long period despite all the challenges: “I feel that I am still needed. I still have the duty to make sure that the transitions to new project heads and to new communities will be done smoothly.” Here, duty takes on another dimension. Not only is it about an institutional Christian imperative, but reflects one’s internalization of that duty. The internalization of the notion that the work of charity and social action is a duty also compels SAC officers to seek and legitimize forms of knowledge and techniques that will allow them to enhance the way they carry out this duty. Fernandez is an interesting case in point. Her task in San Fernando’s SAC is to facilitate the establishment of cooperatives in various communities that will provide loans and pool the resources of the communities. According to Fernandez – “I am not really well versed with financial matters and accounting procedures. But I have had to learn these so that I can help the cooperatives I am building.” In the discourse of duty, the seemingly opposed notions of the SAC worker as both an expert and a learner is resolved by effacing the selfhood of the SAC actor in the very articulation of, say for instance, “it’s not about me, it’s about the duty that must be done” Fernandez justified her persistence in the face of her own criticisms about how the SAC has evolved in later years. The concept of duty can perhaps be seen as the explanatory variable why all of the SAC staff I have interviewed have consistently described their being in the organization not as a source of income or as primarily an employment but as “more than the job.”
In the process of conducting their activities, SAC workers argue that one of their goals is formative: that is the extension of this self- internalized concept of Christian duty to the beneficiary communities and individuals themselves. Among all the workers I have interviewed and conversed with, the notion that “we help others so that they can help themselves too” is a very pervasive theme. Here, the regime of the duty of charity and social action necessitates not just the proper development of techniques that would allow the SAC worker to deliver the necessary services to the beneficiaries but also the formulation of ways in which the beneficiaries themselves are able to internalize the duty of helping others and themselves. This is usually carried out by appointing leaders within each community that will serve as the “alter-egos” of the SAC worker during off-visitation periods. In Sitio Tabod, the SAC adopted the structure of the indigenous people’s tribe, in San Fernando, they elected a different set of officers for the cooperative structure “because some of the village officials are not convinced with the work of the Church in the area” and in Kalookan the parish pastoral councils. These “alter egos” are supposed to replicate the processes in which SAC workers conduct their duties and services within the community. While there are no formal training for these supposedly “alter egos” of the SAC workers, they are, according to Tabang “taught to copy the way we do things when we are with them, such as, opening and closing each meeting or discussion with a prayer, allowing each participant to speak his or her voice when he or she wants to say something to the group, preventing conflicts from escalating and of course, becoming a good example to their community members in the way that we have shown them good faith and example.” In the focus group discussion I took part in Sitio Tabod, the opening prayer was led by village elder Panglima who said, “Thank you God for giving us another chance to gather together to learn from each other and find new means of making our lives better. We especially thank the presence of SAC staff here today and their friendship.” While Panglima was facilitating the discussion, SAC staff Willy and Marlon told me – “he’s learned so much since the time we started visiting their community! Before they were really shy and unable to speak in front of a large group.”
In order to pass on the internalization of the concept of duty in the conduct of Catholic charity, the body of the social action worker must also be formed and performed in such a way that this mandated duty can be effectively carried out. The production of these charitable bodies is also a site where contests for legitimacy, autonomy and dynamics of discipline and regulation come into play. Willy Tabor from Puerto Princesa’s SAC enumerates a number of this bodily/sensory related functions that a SAC must be able to cultivate in the process of conducting his/her duty: “First, one must be able to climb mountains, to sleep wherever one finds oneself in the evening, to not be choosy in terms of accommodations, food and even sanitary conditions. The body of a social action worker is inevitably hardened in the process. Second, one must be able to pay attention to one’s sensory faculties when in communities or in the presence of beneficiaries. Here, listening and intuition are very important since you will need to be able to read in between the lines of what your beneficiaries are saying. Third, not just sensory faculties but also bodily-related motor movements – that is, one must always appear to be patient so as to generate trust, you know, a lot of these people easily notice through the way your body operates in their presence whether you are serious or whether you are simply doing something necessary. Concretely you need to be able to show them that you are both serious, driven but also comfortable in their presence.” Here the conduct of duty creates a spectacle out of the body of the SAC worker that must traverse the expectations of the beneficiary and the ability to fulfill one’s mandated task. In one of my focus group discussions with the volunteers of the SAC of the Diocese of Kalookan, each of my informants recounted how in many respects the practice of charity involves a practice of physically walking – “that’s why we tell our volunteers – are you ready to spend a lot of time and energy walking?” – since social action work demands activities like house to house solicitation, information dissemination and visitation.
It does not end with just the body however. Talking about the physical difficulties of the work of charity and social action is often times an affair of fond remembrance and memory production – “remember the time when we had to spend the night near the river? We even caught a snake during that time”, Marlon reminded Willy and tribal leader Panglima during one of our conversations. For SAC workers, the experience and formation of the charitable body bridges it with the work of soulcraft – the bodily, physical and biological experience of social action work and charitable giving provides the phenomenological ground for an encounter with the redemptive nature and character of charitable and social action activities. Through these physical difficulties, the SAC worker thickens the mandate of duty and invests the dutiful body with a spiritual meaning – “at the end of the day, the hardships are commensurate with one’s fulfillment of having done God’s work with the people. Through my bodyaches and sometimes emotional exhaustion, I remember Jesus on the cross and how he suffered for us” as one of my informants put it. The discipline and “pagsasanay” (getting used to) that the SAC worker undergoes in the conduct of social action work, the experience thus straddles a dialectic of efficiency/ effectiveness and a spiritual encounter, that is the body of the SAC worker in the conduct of duty must be a site of revelation: its ability to cope up with the challenges of community building and development signifies its distinct character and enables a ground of comparison between the religious conduct of charity and the more secular version. In this light, it is no surprise that the observation that “often times, government workers are lazy and unable to cope up with us, so sometimes we also need to slow down especially when we accompany them during ancestral domain mapping tasks” is easily deployed by my informants when contrasting themselves from other organizations engaged in the broader domain of social work.
Total Charity, Charitable Totalities
The third way in which Catholic SAC and charitable workers define charity is by stressing a “total human and integral approach”. It is safe to say that the discourse on a total human approach lies at the very core of social action practices. There are four ways in which this discourse is deployed by SAC workers in conceiving their work and its relation to their engagement with State and other civil society actors. First, the discourse of totality operates through a cause and effect model of thinking that SAC workers circumscribe their analyses and practices – with the individual human person as the central focus of analysis and of intervention and with an almost ontological view that the root cause of social problems lies in the human proclivity towards sinfulness. Second, it implicates the task of social action in a simultaneous process of historicization – the delivery of a total and integral human approach demands from the social action worker a form of historical receptivity that is capable of recognizing the shifts and changes in the discursive and material terrain of human relations. A total human approach conceives the social action project as also historical task – but not in a sense of a staged historical development nor as an intervention into an empty historical time of their target subjects but rather as an acknowledgement of the thorny and complicated negotiations of historical unfolding. Here, history is not seen in a positivist light as dictating the what, how and why of social action priorities, but history as a guide that informs the SAC worker of the imbrications that he or she would necessarily have to be entangled with. Thus, the discourse of totality far from abstracting the act of charity renders it more specific and provides it with a target. Third, and in what may appear first as a contradiction, the discursive production of the SAC worker along the lines of having to deliver a total human approach to service allows for an appreciation of partial responses and compromised interventions without reducing these partialities into a set of disconnected practices that are expected to culminate in an invisible resolution of the dilemmas identified or the other way around, the perpetuation of the very patterns that necessitate charitable practices. The practice of charity within the auspices of human totality becomes a struggle in itself, against itself and with itself and not just a smooth transformative movement that eliminates the need for human agency and ability to appropriate and mobilize sources of identity and technicalities that make sense of what is being done. And fourth, the discourse of charity as total human development reinforces techniques of data production, identification and proliferation where even memories become prized and valuable information that can connect not just the causal chain of social analysis but also as moments where intimacies and human relations are rehearsed and negotiated. Acts of charity and social action become acts of assembling bodies, selves and data to capture the targets of their exercise and rendering them visible amidst concealments that arise out of political and economic circumstances yet also conceals aspects and components that escape the totalizing vision of the charitable/social action worker. Charity in this light becomes a practice of surveillance, rehearsed repeatedly in routine household observations, contact and conversations with the subject of charity. Yet while it is true that a reinforcement of state rationality happens here, and where the religious vision in which these processes proceed from is made vulnerable to being co-opted by a logic of policing subject, the continuous invocation of a total perspective towards things provides SAC workers a space and site for continuous resistance and transgression of competing meanings that circulate around the regime of charity itself. As will be shown in this section, however, even these surveillance techniques can be possibly subverted by the very practice of charity itself. Here, the religious dimension becomes an important analytical variable since the justification of charitable police practices is invested with a plurality of meanings and referents that converge/diverge with state goals and objectives.
On the first point, the discourse of totality allows the SAC worker to construct models of cause and effect and hypothetical statements that explain the persistence and existence of specific patterns of social relations with a religious and theological principle at the logical end of the causal chain which then justifies the conduct of charity as the appropriate response to the established causal relation: “nothing can really change if you do not change your ways here. You have understood how your individual ways can negatively impact the successful implementation of what we do” Marlon Tabang told the assembly of Palaw’an tribal leaders during the middle of our discussion. “For example, why is it that one of the families is again doing kaingin in a part of the mountains which we said we will preserve first for planting? Why would the family of your former kapitan pawn his property again for immediate cash when he knows this is how you are made vulnerable by those who have money in your community? If you don’t change these practices, you know you’ll all end up in stage zero, as if we did not come here and help you out in the first place.” The director of the SAC of the Diocese of Novaliches asserts similarly: “Catholic social teaching puts the individual self at the very heart of social change. This is what faith reflection calls metanoia – a change of heart and a change of orientation in the way people view and do things.”
What SAC workers mean by totality then is not a total social whole in which all parts are in a utopian way harmoniously functioning but a totality of the individual human person and it is this same totality of the human person that must be folded into the logic advanced by charity and social action. This imperative is further strengthened by a religious justification: “since holistic formation is something that only a religious organization like us can provide, when we partner with government institutions and other non-government groups we make it a point that the program for the communities would have a faith-based aspect to it. This need not be explicit, however, since we’re not here to proselytize. When we say faith-based aspect, this is already equivalent with the holistic formation. When they are developed as a complete human being they would be receptive to the Gospel message. Then when they approach us for deeper religious encounter, that’s when we begin a more explicit process of evangelization. Integral evangelization therefore is not proclaiming the word of God without paying attention to the needs of the community. In fact, the very act of paying attention to them is already an act of proclaiming the Gospel message, it is in a way, allowing them to encounter God.” The linkage between the totality of the human person and the realization of the religious imperative is therefore inextricable and for SAC workers must always imply each other. Hence, evangelization is not so much about the inscription of the beneficiaries into the doctrinal teachings of the Church but rather the very realization of the fullness of humanity of these beneficiaries: “when our beneficiaries possess the necessities they require to live a decent life, then we are certain that God is at work. They need not ask to be baptized, they need be more prayerful. These things can come in the future. But we do not make these our priorities – it is the human person whom we prioritize, this human person who was created in God’s image and whom God wants to actualize.”
Here, it may be said that for SAC workers, what needs to be totalized is not the social milleu in which they act but the humanity of the subject of charity. In this linguistic movement, the accountability of the State is (unconsciously deliberately) evaded and the target of analytical consideration shifts to the theologized subject. And yet here, the State is de-emphasized not so much as a direct opposition to the State or because of a deliberate concealment of the State’s role and thus reproduction of legitimacy and authority that is extended in the practice of charity and social action work but more because of the very way in which the religious regime of charity and social action itself shapes the SAC worker’s perspective. Again, this shares in the first set of charitable practices identified in this chapter – the appeal to competence, since for SAC workers, their competency lies not in the reform of government institutions or the mobilization of society towards a holistic ideological or political framework but the very attention to the specific needs and demands of individuals. As Tabang continues, “our first concern is to build the capability of the people rather than to make them reliant on the government or on other non-governmental organizations. When the people have been empowered to conduct their affairs on their own then that is when they will realize the inadequacies of what they do and only at that moment seek the reform of political institutions. Yet this too is a challenge, since many communities revert back to their old ways of doing things especially when we are no longer there. The leaders find it hard to convince their neighbors and other community members because they can easily succumb to group pressures or appeals.”
If the self and not the State or the government is what is ultimately accountable for the maintenance of structures of inequality and poverty, the discourse on practicing charity on the basis of total human development engenders specific practices and techniques with which this self is identified, defined and later on prepared to be changed. To be able to re-create the target of charity into the idealized holistic human person, it must first be dismembered and its problems isolated from a larger narrative and social whole, albeit not in the extreme of abstracting the conditions that have been isolated. This is seen in the way various SAC visually, textually and orally represent their target beneficiaries and communities. When SAC workers describe the conditions of the target beneficiaries covered by their programs and apostolate they often begin with identifying one problem and then linking it to another. What is interesting in the way SAC workers perceive these isolated steps is that “they are never to be seen on their own, since each of the steps actually proceed from a holistic reading of the situation and from the wholeness of the Church’s teaching” while in actuality the conduct and practices attending each step are really no different from the way any non-governmental organizations would conduct their activities – managerial, step-by-step procedures that are fully devoted to each stage and without any immediate sense of wholeness. As Abadilla relates, “when we have a project in a community, our energies are devoted to the fulfillment of the project. Then we find ways in which we can expand these projects. If there are no funds available, sometimes the project has to stop even if it is only addressing symptoms of the issue or just one part of the bigger problem.”
This piece-by-piece, incrementalist approach to the process of “total human development” through community building is bound up with the way SAC workers historicize their activities. As indicated, for SAC workers, while the problems manifested in the communities they organize are intimately linked to social structures, the solution that they can offer is not so much the change of these social structures but the change in the individual ways of doing things among members of these communities that perpetuate their subjection into these social structures. Here, an indifference towards the more structural-historical antecedents and context is discernible in the attitudes of many SAC workers – “all politicians, all government no matter who the administration is, they will of course be bogged down by corruption and ineffectiveness”. Yet by focusing on the individual – “the soul, what lies in their very hearts, their selfishness, their refusal to give, their inability to see that what they do have implications to the environment, their livelihood and to the community at large” – SAC workers speak not of isolated conditions but insist that their beneficiaries see how their small acts are part of a larger narrative in which they are entrenched if they refuse to change. In this way, dismembering is simultaneously aspiring for completion. Isolating is simultaneously assembling. These are processes which in the practices of Catholic social action workers and charitable workers, according to them, occur in a unity rather than in a staged drama as Bishop Broderick Pabillo of the CBCP-NASSA puts it: “when you say step-by step you mean that the first steps are only basic foundations and are only preparatory measures, but we see them as already addressing the problem itself. The moment they start realizing that they need to mobilize and organize themselves or in a more basic way, to change what they usually do, they are already solving problems related to their conditions. The process however takes a long time and we need to keep on making them sure they are committed to what they have realized in the first place.”
To achieve the “total individual human approach” charitable and social action strategies take historically distinct but also overlapping forms. In both the level of the institution and the individual charitable/social action worker, charitable practices in relation to communities and in terms of project content tend to unfold or rather oscillate through and between a movement along the following categories: 1) welfare provision/spiritual encounter; 2) pedagogical instruction; 3) leadership/organization; and 4) managerial relationship; and 5) representation/ partnership. What appears to be constant among all these forms of charitable practices is the spiritual formation imperative but as discussed above, all are actually manifestations of promise of a totalizing vision of man. The same strategies of charity remembered by the SAC workers also constitute the prescribed manner of entry into present and future endeavors. Here, I will refer to the work of the SAC of Puerto Princesa and San Fernando in organizing indigenous tribes in their localities to elucidate these shifts/variations in charitable/social action practices.
As fundamentally mandated to help and empower the “poorest” of the poor, the discourse of totality demands that SAC workers bring to their beneficiaries first and foremost immediate relief. Both SACs of Puerto Princesa and San Fernando originated from the apostolates of their founding directors. According to Marlon Tabang, a staff of the SAC of the Apostolic Vicariate of Puerto Princesa, the organization organically developed in the 70’s-80’s as a result of a priest’s advocacy for the indigenous tribes residing in the mountains of Palawan. During this time, the practice of charity and social action was purely voluntary and there were no paid or professional social workers involved in a full-time basis. It was essentially pastoral in nature and in orientation. The same genesis narrative is attributed by the staff of the Archdiocese of San Fernando: “at first it was just Among (Father) Ed Panlilio. He really was the one who began this idea of social action – he would spend time with the poor, with the various Aeta communities and he would celebrate mass for them. In the process, Among Ed brought in more volunteers and eventually the social action center was established formally.” Here practices of charity include the distribution of food, medicines, clothing and the mobilization of resources towards these purposes within the organization and in their engagement with funding institutions. Assessment tools and evaluation of projects were geared towards maximizing available resources relative to the number of recipients and expanding coverage eventually. Beyond active pastoral care, i.e. preparing, instructing and administering sacramental rites and religious catechesis, little is expected from the SAC worker/volunteer within the domain and paradigm of relief provision. Yet one thing is required: “that we don’t act like we are there to simply distribute goods to them. Instead then of being simple providers we are sharers. That’s why when we bring food to the community, we usually partake it with them – this is to not make them feel uneasy and for them not to treat us differently. If you go there and act like you’re the boss in the area, it’s either they would not trust you or they would only go for the goods – you act like a mere giver of goods and we don’t want that to happen. If that happens then you cannot advance in building ties with your beneficiaries and since what we aspire for is a total human approach, it cannot stop with food/medicine distribution and to be able to know them deeper, you need to act in a specific way that will allow you entry into their lives”, Willie Tabor claims.
The shift or rather, oscillation in orientation from the discourse of pastoral care towards entrenching social action presence in the community is justified in the dialectics between responding to concrete needs discovered and identified in the initial process and being able to fulfill the mandated duty of total human development. One strategy which enables the circulation and exchange of mutual trust between the SAC worker and the beneficiaries/community is through practices of education. Here, the relationship moves from a one of provider-recipient to one of teacher-student and prescribes a different set of charitable practices. Concretely practices of education refer to a constellation of knowledge transfer and cultivation from basic literacy skills, ecological management, hygiene, health and diseases, to conflict resolution, livelihood enhancement and financial literacy. In both general terms and in more specific projects like education, the discourse of totality guides social action and charitable practice. The educational imperative grounded on Catholic social teaching thus instantiated partnerships between social action centers and governmental agencies. It also demanded the construction of physical spaces and edifices that facilitate educational efforts such as SAC staff houses in different communities that double functionally as classrooms, clinics and training centers for livelihood programs and a myriad of other communal activities. I also observed how social action processes via the demand of education requires negotiating reflexivity towards the subject and content of the educational materials imparted to the different communities and sensitivity to the cultural traditions, historical practices and sensibilities of the subject of charitable and social action work – “you need to develop ways that will facilitate a smoother process of learning” that inevitably involves a process of translation or conversion of technical concepts into the local and indigenous imaginary of the community. Thus, the social action worker is not just a source of knowledge in this relationship but an agent mediating between dominant techniques of knowledge formation and the differences in class, culture and tradition that are embodied by the lived experience of the subjects of charity/social action which at the same time makes him/her a facilitator of communities’ inscription into processes/discourses of modernity. In my interviews with the beneficiary indigenous people communities of the SACs of San Fernando and Puerto Princesa, SAC workers are not just seen as bearers of expertise or competence, they are also seen as “the ones who modernized us, showed us that our old ways cannot be sustained and can be destructive to our own lives.” The same observation is articulated by beneficiary communities that are not necessarily composed of indigenous tribes like the prisoners of the city jails of Malabon, Kalookan and Navotas under the care of the Diocese of Kalookan’s SAC.
The third and fourth ways in which the total human approach to social action and charity is rehearsed by SAC workers/volunteers involve the linked practices of leadership formation /organizational capability building and practices of managerialism. By traditional practices of leadership formation, I refer to a more fluid system of ensuring that communities where SAC operate are provided with key role models that set the standard and embody the values taught and nurtured by the SAC staffs and volunteers. The diffusion on the other hand of a managerialist ethic pertains to the deployment of strategies of charity and social welfare grounded on the principles of objectification, risk-minimizing, financialization, innovation, and increasing controls over activities conducted in the field. I discuss these two in tandem because the movement from the emphasis of traditional leadership formation towards a more managerial approach in the literature on the voluntary sector and on non-governmental organizations tends to emphasize a break rather than a continuity in historical forms of social action and charitable practices. Instead of a break, one can find in the expressions and justifications of the SAC workers I have encountered a notion that managerial practices constitute a holistic totality consonant with rather than contradicting more traditional charitable practices and that these have emerged organically out of the SAC’s increasing drive towards effective service delivery and understanding of its goals and mission in relation to the communities and the beneficiaries they serve. In fact, the images deployed and religious norms expressed by SAC workers obviate the possibility of reflexively distinguishing between managerial practices and more traditional forms of building the capacities and leadership formation of SAC charitable recipients. This conflation of practices involving “allowing them to stand up and organize themselves” and “teaching them how to avoid risks and to maximize their resources” serves a significant purpose in the operation of disciplinary logics of neoliberal governmentality within the very activities of social action and charity. Yet the very same tendency to conflate traditional leadership and managerial practices provides the linguistic space in which these logics are upset.
In the cases of San Fernando’s two-year old Integrated Community Development Program which covers all communities and areas serviced by the SAC, and Puerto Princesa’s Indigenous Peoples Development Program, social action and charity as practices of leadership formation unfolded along three inter-related levels: firstly, the deliberation, construction, and proliferation through informal means of an inclusivist/ exclusivist collective identity dynamics during which the SAC worker acts as the community’s leader and delineates for the community what it means to become part of their program. This strategy is deployed vis-à-vis the construction of a “we/they” narrative that community members repeatedly invoke when describing themselves in relation to others in the village who are not part of the core set of beneficiaries: “once you have become part of the project of the SAC you no longer do the things that others in our community do which can harm our environment, our relations and our livelihood. Unlike them we know better.” The process according to my informants involves collective reflections during meetings where community members and leaders join each other in identifying their problems, linking it to their own practices and then affirming values and insights learned from SAC staffs. In the Aeta village in Pampanga, the “we/they” tension is much more palpable. Unlike Sitio Tabod which is characterized by a relative homogeneity of its inhabitants, the Aetas are more differentiated in terms of income, mobility and education. They are also more vocal, participative and insistent in their demands. Usually these narratives emerge during gossiping/bonding/updating sessions while having a couple (or more) of gin and beer in the evenings when SAC staffs conduct routine visitations. During the time that I accompanied Willie Tabor and Marlon Tabang in Sitio Tabod, the drinking session lasted way into the early hours of the morning and conversations between the SAC volunteers and the tribal leaders were filled with stories of affirmation of how they have been doing things in the community according to the instructions of the SAC staffs. Once this attempt to articulate a collective identity is internalized via expressed statements of the community leaders, SAC staffs legitimize the authority of their local indigenous leaders by giving their opinions primacy during meetings and deliberations and ultimately deferring to their decisions. In the same tribal council meeting facilitated by the Tabor and Tabang during our visit to the site, the SAC staffs would always punctuate their suggestions to the community by calling on Panglima and Una Napir – the top two recognized leaders – to evaluate whether their suggestions are valid in the terms of the community’s values, traditions and ways of thinking. Finally, the process of leadership formation as a practice of charity and social action culminates in devolving tasks to community leaders along functional categories such as project oversight, reporting and mobilizing members for collective endeavors.
The shift from a relationship established along leadership formation towards one animated by an ethic of managerialism enables a different set of social action strategies and charitable practices. This managerial discourse can be observed in the way SAC staffs and directors deliberate during planning and project evaluation sessions which are reproduced in the same way SAC workers organize community-based planning and evaluations. Managerial practices occur alongside traditional practices of leadership formation. In the development of the SACs studied here, intimations of a managerial organizational culture inflect staff discussions on project planning, fund-sourcing, execution, and assessment. In most cases, this emergent managerial culture is discursively deployed via a set of two binaries: one, cost versus coverage; and two, sustainability versus immediacy.
The varied narratives demonstrating the micropolitics of Catholic social action and charity discussed in the preceding pages highlight key moments in which the dichotomous portrayal of religious actors as either reactionary or progressive are broken down. What the statements and stories present is an account of the religious subject that is impossible to cast in homogenizing labels. Instead, the narratives suggest that religious practices of charity and social action are fraught with tensions and contradictions that religious actors negotiate in indeterminable points of their endeavors. Charitable workers in the conduct of their activities may on the one hand, embody and extend dominant hegemonic rationalities such as neoliberalism, neocolonial discourses of community building and other attendant state or market projects, and on the other hand, proliferate and promote ways of doing things that transgress and challenge the legitimate operation of these projects; but these technologies, in so far as they are embedded in a system of power/knowledge and do not by themselves contain meaning outside of the historical and institutional contexts from where they are deployed and understood cannot be portrayed as operating in a smooth, unproblematic manner. In the context of a hegemonic discourse of imperial neoliberalism characterized by attempts to freeze historical moments and create an unbounded space through which forms of domination are made to operate (Hardt and Negri 2000), neglecting the simultaneity of these processes at work in the subjectivity of the religious actor or bifurcating religious actors into categories of conservativism or progressivism constitutes ideological dangers that reinforce the power of the dominant discourse to repress certain forms of subjectivity while privileging others.
