Kinship-ing Your Way to Success: Decoding the "Asian Ways" of Filipino Society

"Hiya" "amor-propio" "compadre"...and series of local sociological concepts rolls off the pages of a cultural learning book detailing the tendencies of Filipino behaviors.  All of these, foreign-sounding at the first sight, after even the most brief of explanations, become terribly familiar for someone who has seen perhaps a bit too much of the collectivist values so ingrained within Asian societies.  It is as the author said so well in the prologue, Filipino society, despite its Western-looking facade of English use, Christian beliefs, and American cultural affinity due 400 years of Western colonization, is not at all a Western society at heart.

Indeed, as much as Filipinos like to think of themselves as much more in tune with the Western ways of life, sometimes in outrageously visual ways, it has much more in common with fellow Asians to the north and west rather than the Europeans and Americans across the ocean.  It can be said to be a source of major frustration for Westerners, who attempt to treat Filipinos in the context of Judeo-Christian culture, only to see the utterance of familiar ideological terms in English to only confuse themselves.  Only slowly do they come to understand that those terms have no meaning or acquired new meanings in the Filipino society.

As an initial introduction to the differences, it is essential to acknowledge simply how important "kinship systems" are to Filipinos.  In the Western world, instilling "independence" is a basic value when it comes to nurturing a child.  Children leave home at age 18, fighting their ways through the world to establish their own personal marks with minimal support of their parents and relatives, establishing their own personal reputation that is sometimes completely incongruous with those held their family members.  This process is undertaken even by those whose families are rich enough to not need such independent initiatives for survival.

The same eagerness to move on by themselves on the part of the young ones will surely cause massive offense in the Philippines.  A child eager to leave home is taken as a sign that the parents have failed to acquire his/her love, bringing shame (or "hiya") to the entire family.  Only poor families would reluctantly let kids go work in big cities to help with the family's financial situations.  The rich would not consider letting the kids leave the family home until marriage, when they form their own nuclear families.  Such willingness to stay with parents would be a major source of irritation for any kid brought up in the West.

Similar as it is to Asian cultures elsewhere, the need for family integrity of the Filipinos is affecting its general society in much more than some subtle ways that your regular Westerners can pass off as amusing cultural trivia.  The importance of extended family as a primary social unit has shaped Filipino political and economic scenes to ones dominated not by meritocracy and internal competition between the talented, but by nepotism marked by preferential promotion of those with blood ties.  Large businesses and political constituencies are owned by hereditary dynasties for which outsiders have little chance to intervene.

Yet, Filipino society has also simultaneously given hope to outsiders to participate in profitable nepotism.  Families and kinship ties can be extended, by blood, by rites, and by actions.  A child borne by a set of a parents is a physical manifestation of two extended families.  The more the children, the earlier they come, the stronger the bond of the families into one kinship circle.  Or one can become a "compadre" (godfather) or "commadre" (godmother) by paying for the baptism of a new-born child in the neighborhood, thereby squarely putting one in the ties of the godchild's extended family.

And most powerfully and spontaneously, one can enter others' families, sometimes without even oneself realizing, by behaving in, as one would say, familial ways.  Filipino families are all about sharing, joys and grievings, goods and cash, favors and successes.  Exchanging gifts and favors will undoubtedly create a cascading set of mental debts and counter-debts among different people that will together bind them all into some sort of family by obligation.  To ignore such inescapable obligations would be not only social unjust, but also an omen that one will become a social outcast in the near future.

To be honest, your author is rather dismayed that all these complicated family ties bring Filipinos together.  He is of the belief that Asian-style collectivism, such as the Confucian case, is fundamentally evil due to its tendency to suppress innovation and promote tangled hierarchy that slows down everything good and entrenches everything bad.  In other words, the failure of Western colonialism to break the bind of the nepotism-filled Filipino family structure is ultimately a misfortune for the Philippines that serves as an obstacle for its sustained growth.  The Westerners should certainly be aware of its implications.