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A trowel (/ˈtraʊ.əl/), in the hands of an archaeologist, is like a trusty sidekick – a tiny, yet mighty, instrument that uncovers ancient secrets, one well-placed scoop at a time. It’s the Sherlock Holmes of the excavation site, revealing clues about the past with every delicate swipe.
A few days ago, my friend and colleague Karminn Daytec Yañgot shared a post about a problem that many of us in Indigenous studies, anthropology, archaeology, history, and heritage work keep running into. Some of our colleagues, she noted, remain preoccupied with the idea that decolonization means locating an authentic Indigenous self in a precolonial past, as if Indigenous peoples are unchanging, as if history happened everywhere else but somehow stopped at the edge of Indigenous worlds.
That habit runs deep in Philippine public discourse. It appears whenever people ask what is truly Filipino, purely native, or really precolonial. It appears in arguments about food, ritual, architecture, and language. It also appears in national histories that search for one interior cultural voice that can stand in for the whole archipelago, as if the many peoples of these islands once shared one worldview, one cultural core, one story.
That story offers coherence and a way around colonial injury by searching for a self supposedly untouched by it. But it gives us bad history, and anthropology helped make that history possible. For a long time, the discipline treated Indigenous peoples as if they belonged to another time, as survivals, remnants, or windows into an earlier stage of human life. The “native” became someone to document before disappearance, someone valued for distance from modernity. In that frame, change meant loss, and engagement with markets, states, schools, or Christianity signaled corruption. The more a community appeared untouched, the more useful it became to anthropology’s archive.
This is not limited to ethnography. It entered public discourse and nationalistic history. As the nation searched for an authentic self, Indigenous peoples became stand-ins for origins, and their complexity was pushed aside.
The first problem is that “Filipino” is not an ancient identity recovered from the deep past. It is a historical and political category shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and the modern state. To search for an authentic precolonial Filipino is to project the nation backward into a time when it did not yet exist.
Archaeology makes that hard to sustain. The deeper we dig, the less believable purity becomes. Long before Spain, the archipelago was tied to the broader Southeast Asian region, China, South Asia, and the Islamic world through exchange and movement. Sites across the Philippines have yielded ceramics, beads, metals, and other materials that point to regular contact. Communities did not simply absorb outside influences. They selected, reworked, and gave local meaning to what moved across seas. The precolonial past was already shaped by encounter.
The concept of pericolonialism is useful here. If there is no uncolonized in a colonized setting, then colonialism cannot be treated as external to Indigenous life, and decolonization cannot mean recovering an untouched self from before contact. It sees Indigenous worlds as shaped through ongoing negotiation with colonial conditions, without reducing Indigenous peoples to passive products of colonial rule.
We see the problem with purity thinking in how people talk about food. Many ask which dishes are truly ours, untouched by colonizers or foreign influence. But food rarely obeys purity rules. Crops moved, tastes traveled, and recipes changed. Even foods that seem old and local are often products of movement, adaptation, and exchange. What people now defend as authentic usually carries a long history of change.
The same issue appears in how Indigenous peoples are represented. They are too often treated as custodians of a frozen past. Their legitimacy is judged by how closely they match outsider fantasies of tradition. A community that participates in state institutions or adjusts ritual life to present needs may be dismissed as less authentic. Anthropology helped build that trap by rewarding timelessness and by treating change as contamination.
My work in Ifugao returns me to this point again and again. For decades, the rice terraces were promoted as 2,000-year-old monuments, proof of an ancient and unbroken genius. The claim circulated in textbooks, heritage discourse, and tourism because it fit a larger narrative. The older the terraces, the deeper the roots of the nation. Antiquity became synonymous with authenticity.
But community stories and archaeology refute that story. Research suggests that the large-scale intensification of wet-rice terrace systems in Ifugao is more recent and tied to the early colonial period. Rather than standing outside history, the terraces were part of an Indigenous response to Spanish intrusion and to changing political and economic conditions. That does not reduce their significance. It tells us something more interesting. The terraces reveal strategy, decision-making, and adaptation. They show Indigenous communities shaping landscapes under pressure, not preserving a timeless world outside history.
Still, many prefer the older narrative. The reason is not evidence. It is desire. Nationalistic histories want clean origins. They want an ancient center, a stable inside, a cultural essence that can gather the nation into one voice. In that framework, archaeology is expected to affirm what the nation already wants to hear. Anthropology, when it searches for the authentic native rather than historicized people, becomes an accomplice.
And then we have to ask who gets folded into that national voice and who gets pushed aside. Lowland, Christian, Tagalog-centered ideas of culture can easily pass as native and universal, while Muslim histories, upland histories, maritime histories, and regional histories are pushed to the margins or absorbed into a script they did not author. The nation speaks in the name of all while narrowing who counts as representative.
This is also an issue of accountability. Scholars, heritage workers, and public intellectuals cannot keep mining Indigenous communities for symbols that support national pride while ignoring their struggles in the present. We cannot celebrate textiles, terraces, rituals, and ancestral landscapes while remaining quiet about land dispossession, extraction, displacement, or token consultation. It is easy to claim Indigenous pasts as part of national heritage. It is harder to stand with Indigenous peoples when rights, land, and political voice are at stake.
The search for an authentic precolonial Filipino fails not only because the past is complex. It fails because the search itself rests on the wrong premise, one often reinforced by nationalist historians in search of a usable origin. It turns history into a purity test. It projects the nation backward. It asks anthropology and archaeology to validate myths of origin. It turns Indigenous peoples into measures of authenticity rather than partners in historical knowledge and political struggle.
The Philippines does not need a singular precolonial self to push back against colonialism. It needs a more honest history, one that recognizes plurality, mobility, adaptation, and unequal power. It needs scholarship that stops treating Indigenous peoples as survivals and starts treating them as thinkers, critics, and decision-makers in the present. It needs research that refuses to serve nationalist nostalgia. Most of all, it needs us to ask what kinds of stories we tell when we say “we,” and who disappears when that “we” becomes too sure of itself. – Rappler.com
Stephen B. Acabado is professor of anthropology at the University of California-Los Angeles. He directs the Ifugao and Bicol Archaeological Projects, research programs that engage community stakeholders. He grew up in Tinambac, Camarines Sur.
