Details

In his long and distinguished career as a medical psychiatrist, Dr. Luciano P. R. Santiago cultivated a keen understanding of the frailties and vagaries of human nature. This is a skill that he applied with equal precision to the study of Philippine culture and history—specifically the stories of liminal, transitional figures who occupied the often dimly illuminated interstices of Philippine colonial history during Spanish rule. He was most interested in transformational arcs, when individuals—by virtue of ancestry, will, or circumstance—emerged from historical obscurity to embody history-making change and self-actualization.

Dr. Santiago’s approach to historiography did not focus on grand sweeping narratives nor did he attempt to interpret the zeitgeist of a particular historical moment in the context of purposive scholarship. Instead, he was an inveterate chronicler, employing the miniaturist’s compulsive attention to detail to the quotidian world of a vanished culture and the long-forgotten personages that inhabited it.

In the works of Dr. Santiago, Philippine history becomes a series of “revealed” memories, especially of seminal Filipinos whom modern readers may otherwise have not known because they were not necessarily heroes or larger-than-life figures who reversed the course of history. Instead, their lives unfolded in the obscure annotations on a family genealogy, in a baptismal document, in a marriage certificate, in the codicil to a will, in the documentation of a legal dispute, and finally, in the remembrances delivered by families or friends upon their often ordinary deaths.

This definitive reader features twenty-two of Dr. Santiago’s key essays on genealogy, art history, religious history, and pioneering Filipinos. The reader is invited to reflect not just on the breadth of Dr. Santiago’s scholarship, but also his particular and carefully detailed investigations into what he called the terra incognita of Philippine colonial history.

REVIEW

“Reading Santiago’s pieces is not just a pursuit of chronological events. It is also a form of remembering, of participating ever so briefly, in his world of real men and women who are living, loving, and clearing a path for themselves.”

— Ino Manalo, Chair, National Commission for the Culture and Arts
from the Foreword

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