The word made flesh : an ethnographic history of Eskayan, a utopian language and script in the southern Philippines

Abstract

In 1980, news of an uncontacted 'Eskaya tribe' began emanating from the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. Early visitors were fascinated by the group's unique language and complex writing system, which are still used today by some 500 people for song, prayer, teaching and the reproduction of a large corpus of traditional literature. Though few have attempted to analyse the Eskayan language, exotic theories of its origins are widely circulated by outsiders. It has been claimed variously that Eskayan is a fossilised indigenous language, that it is displaced from Europe or the Middle East, or that it was invented in order to encourage government development. According to the speakers own account, however, the language and script were created by the ancestral 'pope' Pinay who used the human body as inspiration. A systematic comparison shows that its syllabic script has a Roman influence and that Eskayan grammar is adapted from Visayan, the language of Bohol. The vocabulary, meanwhile, shows almost no relationship to languages of the region. I argue that the putative creator Pinay coined new words for Visayan and that he took partial inspiration from the lexicons and sound systems of Spanish and English. An analysis of the traditional literature, oral histories and archival sources suggests that Pinay's identity is bound up in the biography of Mariano Datahan (ca. 1875-1949) a Messianic rebel soldier who founded a utopian community in southeast Bohol in the aftermath of the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). With his flair for the miraculous Datahan resurrected Pinay's lost language which was to become, for his followers, the embodiment of a recuperated indigenous 'nationhood' in Bohol. As a unique case of constructed indigeneity 'from below', the extraordinary history of Eskayan draws attention to the special importance of language and writing in the reimagination of postcolonial identities. Show more