Recognition and the Mobile Indigene: Periphery and Possibility The Badjao of the Philippines

Abstract

The substantial consideration given to empathy in current political discourse and popular press is evidence of its growing attention and thus of its inevitable significance in political inquiry. Employing empathy helps deepen understanding of how states have "recognised" marginal subjects in the periphery of state power. The links between political recognition and marginality have been broadly studied in multiculturalist and feminist scholarship yet anxieties abound against a politics of recognition based on empathy. What do we miss out if we are to disregard an empathy-based politics of recognition? This thesis engages with this concern using critical feminist and subaltern perspectives. I employ a politicised notion of empathy to progress a new analytical framework which I call empathic recognition defined as the obligation to enter the world of the Other, the marginalised in society, and in solidarity, reimagine a more just state acknowledged through policy, institution, civil society, and government. I use empathic recognition to thresh out the dubiousness of the current notion of political recognition when applied to marginalised subjects such as the traditionally sea-based nomadic turned land-based urban dwelling (semi)sedentary Badjao Indigenous peoples of the Philippines.

In this thesis, I raise the question: How has political recognition impacted on the status of the Badjao as citizens of the Philippines? To expound on this main question, I further ask: What is the nature of this state-initiated recognition? What are its limits and implications for the Badjao? Can the Badjao move from periphery to possibility? What is the role of empathic recognition in reconfiguring a direction towards social transformation? The study's interpretive approach employed participant observation, life stories, and key informant interviews and was likewise keenly attuned to empathy as embedded in the conduct of research. Discourse analysis used in the review of relevant offline and online documents unveils the marginalising discourses against the Badjao as well as the (un)empathic sensibilities within policymaking and development. The Badjao case study, I argue, demonstrates how the current notion of political recognition - couched within modernist (neo)liberal rationalities and expressed in policymaking and development - is limiting and inadequate, therefore dubious. Here, I underscore the following key points of my study: First, lack of empathy generates dubious forms of recognition which result in inadequate, unresponsive and ineffective, even unjust policies; Second, (un)empathic sensibilities are embedded in state instrumentalities and embodied by state agents at various levels; Third, the state through its agents hold varying and complex subjectivities while empathy levels vary and fluctuate between and among levels of government. Thus, despite formal recognition, the Badjao continue to suffer from systemic marginalisation now more tethered to the state with their increasing engagement with policies and programmes. This dubious recognition is a double-edged sword that has not only led to intensification of Badjao marginality but also to a spiralling process of legibility and eligibility that constitute them as liminal citizens. But an important feature of this study is that it does not foreclose contingent political agency of the Badjao. Thus, I further argue that Badjao subjects just as well re-assemble and mobilise an inchoate array of affect and emotive responses both as a project of generating empathy and as strategy to engaging with the state and mainstream society. The test for the triumph of political recognition is abbreviated in the question, 'How are marginalised subjects determining their own futures, realising social justice? Show more