THE EMERGENT AND AMBIVALENT LOCATIONS OF CULTURE: PERCEPTION OF OPEN RATIONALITY IN TIGSIK

Abstract

Purpose: Tigsik (banquest toast) is a treasure of the Bikolanos for its reference of cultural practices and sensibilities. It pays tribute or criticize people and ways of life, associated to dalit and uttered extemporaneously in a drinking spree, simple gathering or cultural festivals. Methodology: Considering Homi Bhabha’s notion on ambivalence and hybridity and Virgilio Almario’s nativist nationalism, these tigsiks establish the perception of open rationality in the colonized context on how to get along with the Westerns and modernism, and emerge to the present culture and yet retain their local subjectivities.FIndings Hence, the paper explores the constructs of orality, metaphor and conservatism to articulate the emegent and ambivalent locations of culture. Each time this encounter between Self and Other occurs at the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image (as in the case of the symptoms analyzed in this paper),Implications it evacuates the Self as the site of identity and autonomy and leaves a mark of the subject, a sign of cultural identity, Originality: the perception of open rationality. These become the moment in which the demand for identification takes the form of a response to other questions of signification and desire, culture, and politics.