Crime and punishment in Spanish times

WHEN people ask me difficult questions I cannot answer offhand, I remind them that I am not Ernie Baron who has built a reputation as a "walking Encyclopedia," whatever that means. At the very least, Baron is humble enough not to claim omniscience like God -- unlike some academics I know who are just waiting to be struck down by lightning one day. Filipinos are easily impressed by memory and mistake having a great deal of disjointed facts lying around in the head ready for use at any given time for knowledge.

Because of my failure to answer questions as well as the fact that I still have a head full of black hair, make people doubt the things I say or write. My memory is good for useless things like Jose Rizal's waistline, the length of Andres Bonifacio's bolo or Apolinario Mabini's favorite dance steps. It is not deep enough for something like a diachronic analysis of the effect of the Philippine economy on the political situation from 1565-1965. Neither do I have a knack for dates and names, thus I have over the years developed research skills.

Students do not need to waste their time on memory work. The more important skill they should learn is to know where to find the answers to nagging questions in a library or the Internet. In my area of specialization, I have spent hours reading bibliographies and finding guides in a vain attempt to get a view of the landscape. So far, I have only seen a faint outline and not the entire horizon. Bibliographies may not be the best things to bring on a beach vacation, but in my own bizarre way I find these fascinating.

Even professional Filipiniana librarians smile when I tell them how much I have enjoyed browsing through the basic references on the Spanish period: Wenceslao Emilio Retana's handsome three-volume "Aparato bibliografico de la historia general de Filipinas" (Barcelona, 1906), Trinidad H, Pardo de Tavera's "Biblioteca Filipina" (Washington, 1903) and last but not least Jose Toribio Medina's "Imprenta de Manila desde sus origenes hasta 1810" (Santiago de Chile 1896). These bibliographies not only describe the books physically (size and number of pages, place of publication, etc.), they also contain abstracts of the contents as well as opinions on their reliability or usefulness. In the case of Pardo de Tavera, he even steps beyond the academic politesse and lambasts a certain author he did not like both professionally and personally.

Aside from the bibliographies above, another of my eccentric pastimes is going over the two-volume index to the 55-volume "Philippine Islands" as compiled by "Blair and Robertson." The entries on "Crime and Criminals" cover a page and a half and the classification alone is worth a doctoral dissertation, because the notion of crime alone says so much about a specific society in a given time. Society defines crime and sets the mode of punishment. If you want a different angle to study Philippine society and history, crime and punishment are the way to go.

There are separate entries for crimes committed by Filipinos, Spaniards and Chinese. Specific crimes are then listed: bodily violence (assault and battery), torture, stabbing, poisoning, murder (assassination, homicide, infanticide and parricide). All these cover a third of a page, while another third is concerned with dishonesty: gambling is quite sizeable and one shouldn't be surprised to find the historical roots of jueteng here. There are entries on bribery, smuggling, usury, forgery, counterfeiting, swindling, embezzlement, robbery and highway robbery. All these still plague us today although on a different scale and form.

Crimes of impurity share the same number of entries as crimes against religion. Then as now, they had adultery, incest, improper relations (concubinage and licentiousness), rape, bigamy, polygamy. Sodomy was lumped with "sin against nature" or homosexuality. The crimes against religion, like blasphemy, simony and teaching of erroneous doctrines, may still be with us today, but in our pluralistic society we don't notice them as much as they did in the Spanish Philippines.

There were other crimes: debt, false witness, treason, conspiracy, arson, perjury, abduction, libel and even obscure crimes among natives like tale-bearing and breaking the silence taboo.

Going through all these will provide enough material for creative writers searching for material to use in novels and short stories.

Significantly, if you turn to the entries on "Penalties" for the above crimes, you will find about seven pages enumerating: arrest and imprisonment (slavery, and being sentenced to galleys), confiscation, exile and banishment, fines, loss of office, disqualification from municipal elections, etc. There is a lot of corporal punishment: mutilation, lashes (flogging, scourging, whipping, etc.), bastinado, suspension by the arms, cutting of hair, short rations of water, being cast into the sea, pounding rice. Then there was capital punishment through burning, decapitation, drowning, flaying, garrote, hanging, shooting, stabbing, etc. Ecclesiastical punishments are also listed: excommunication, censure and interdict, public penance, silence and seclusion, etc.

Crime and punishment is a way to study Philippine society but basic material lies largely unused in Blair and Robertson.

Comments are welcome at aocmpo@ateneo.edu