Chapter 1
The Politics of Heritage
My sense memories of the Muslim quarter of Cotabato City are vivid and abundant. They include colors and patterns—bright designs of red, orange, and green—unfamiliar or long forgotten elsewhere in the Philippines. I recall the scent of wet goats and wood smoke and other reassuring aromas of rural life transposed to an urban setting. But the most insistent sensations, those leaving the deepest traces, are the sounds, and especially the melodies heard there. My days in the city were saturated with music, and an interior sound track accompanies almost every recollection. Most ubiquitous was Western (typically American) popular music, heard almost everywhere on radios and cassette tape players. More than once the sound of rock and roll standards roaring from a portable radio in an especially unlikely setting would induce that peculiar shock of the familiar in an exotic context.
There were, however, other popular musics more local and much-listened-to, and often, as I walked the main road of Campo Muslim in the early evening, the sounds of three or four musical genres emanating from as many houses competed for my attention. There were the traditional musics of Cotabato, bright tunes played on the kulintang (gongs), or ballads (bayuk ) sung unaccompanied by instruments, or, most popular, dayunday —romantic song duels between men and women sung in an archaic upriver dialect but accompanied by modern guitars. Rebel songs were another immensely popular musical form. These were composed by ordinary rebel fighters during the armed
insurgency and sung in Magindanaon, usually to the tunes of popular Filipino or American songs. They had been locally recorded and were played on jukeboxes in coffeehouses throughout the Muslim district. Increasingly, one could also hear popular Islamic songs from the Middle East or Malaysia played on the nightly Islamic radio program and available on cassettes.
These musics, like musical forms everywhere, tend to be associated with particular social identities. Western pop music, for example, is a central component of Philippine popular culture, arguably the most Western-oriented mass culture of any Southeast Asian nation. Muslims who listen to Western pop (or who engage in a number of other activities) participate in the dominant culture of the Philippine republic, that of Christian Filipinos. The sound of indigenous music induces listeners to identify as Magindanaons, or often more particularly as "upriver" or "downriver" people. Rebel songs are the music of the proponents of a Philippine Muslim nation even though, as shall be seen, they also include many distinctly local associations; and those who listen to Islamic songs are partaking in a form of revitalized Islamic identity as self-consciously "true Muslims" (in Magindanaon, tidtu-tidtu a Muslim ).
Unsurprisingly, most residents of Campo Muslim prefer more than one music, and some listen to them all. The musics (and their associated identities) occasionally jostle one another but mainly coexist, both in Muslim communities and in individual Muslim selves. That coexistence is facilitated by the existence of one additional music, composed of sacred words and sounds, that transcends the other musics (not only because it issues from the largest loudspeakers) and betokens a more inclusive social identity. The sound of the call to prayer defines the limits of the Muslim quarter of Cotabato City. Those who recognize that call (including those not moved by it to pray) identify themselves as members of an established community of Muslims joined to the world of Islam (dar al-Islam ).
The inclusivity of the everyday Muslim identity articulated by the call to prayer is such that virtually every activity contained within its purview—even enjoying the latest hit song by Madonna—is in some sense a distinctively "Muslim" activity simply by the fact of its occurrence in a Muslim community. There is nothing uniquely Islamic about this phenomenon. The church bells that pealed majestically each noonday of my childhood announced an urban Catholic neighborhood and rang just as meaningfully for local street toughs, "bad girls," and bar
patrons as they did for clergy and churchgoers. All who recognized the Angelus were equivalently identified by its daily declaration of bounds.
Appreciation for the inclusive nature of the everyday Islamic identity of Cotabato Muslims compels the realization that it is a privileged identity but not, as some have imagined, a primordial and determining one (one that transcends time and space). While it encompasses numerous cultural and social distinctions it by no means extinguishes them; and although it references a universal and scriptural Islam, it is grounded in localized and informally transmitted understandings of historical experience. The most inclusive collective identity available to Cotabato Muslims—their self-recognition as a Muslim people—is, no less than their other social identities, specifically situated and historically contingent.
Problems arise when such complexly constructed identities become targets for intense politicization. The politics of heritage (see below) is a politics of exclusivity. The leaders of the Muslim separatist movement in Cotabato have attempted to advance a new, objectified, Philippine Muslim identity cleansed of complexities. Local allegiances have been de-emphasized in favor of Muslim national sentiment; well-loved customs have been disapproved as un-Islamic and unfamiliar ones encouraged. Ordinary Muslims have cautiously but firmly resisted these attempts to dictate identity while, at the same time, they have provided strong support to the separatist cause.
This book tracks the historical construction of both the everyday Islamic identity of Cotabato Muslims and the Muslim nationalist identity prescribed for them by separatist leaders. It chronicles the extraordinary contemporary struggle for Muslim autonomy from the Philippine state as well as the subtle everyday contests between ordinary Muslims and those who would lead them. The remainder of this chapter examines various attempts to theorize the attempted politicization of transcendent identities, especially in the context of armed separatism.
National Sentiment, Social Distance, and the Problem of Adherence
The proliferation of separatist struggles in the postcolonial world in the past decades has prompted a surge of scholarly interest since 1980 in nations and nationalisms (see, e.g., Anderson 1983; Fox 1990; Handler 1988; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Kapferer 1988). In his
singularly influential essay, "Imagined Communities," Benedict Anderson offers an "anthropological" definition of the nation as "an imagined political community—[one] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (1983, 15). Anderson's nations imagine themselves as sovereign entities even though they may find it impossible to achieve or maintain genuine political independence. In its current anthropological formulation, "nationalism" refers to shared "conceptions of peoplehood" or of a "common ('national') culture" (Fox 1990, 3). By that measure, all nationalisms are ethno nationalisms in that all are concerned with peoplehood and with "cultural productions of public identity" (Fox 1990, 4). Nations do differ from certain other imagined or ascribed ethnic entities—Irish Catholics, for instance, or Asian Americans, or "people of color"—in that they are almost always bounded territorially as well as conceptually, with territoriality a matter of utmost significance even in those cases where a considerable proportion of a nation's citizens reside outside its enunciated boundaries. Nations (or nationalist political movements) are also distinguished by their possession of official nationalist ideologies. Nationalist elites produce particular conceptions of peoplehood and create "citizens" by means of formal discourses, representations, and rituals.
Nationalism constitutes a politics of shared heritage in that nationalist ideologies invariably assert a collective birthright of sovereignty over a particular territory. Nationalism is also a politics of heritage in the less literal sense in that nationalist ideologies prominently feature self-conscious attempts to identify and preserve a posited cultural heritage (see, e.g., Handler 1988; Bendix 1992; Spencer 1990). Nations, or "nation[s]-in-waiting" (Bowman 1993, 451), are self-regarding social collectivities with specific political goals, the most important of which is the control of the core territories claimed as their rightful heritage. Separatist struggles feature attempts by aspiring nations to wrest control of a proclaimed national territory from the illegal grasp of an alien state.
The Bangsamoro Rebellion—the armed endeavor by supporters of a proclaimed Philippine Muslim nation (Bangsamoro) to reclaim the "traditional" lands of the Muslim peoples of the Philippines—typifies such a separatist struggle. Its examination also points up a characteristic complexity when one attempts to understand the process by which symbolic appeals to a particular shared heritage are used to mobilize populations for nationalist action. As is the case with most other envisioned nations, the social collectivity imagined as the Philippine Mus-
lim nation contains substantial disparities in social power—disparities that generate conflicting interests and centrifugal tensions. Insofar as social collectivities constituted (or in the process of constituting themselves) as nations tend overwhelmingly to be crosscut by structurally opposed positions and interests, analyses of nationalism must face squarely the problem of the mobilization of national sentiment across class, caste, and other structural divides. To assert in response that nationalist mobilization in such cases is accomplished by means of nationalist ideologies merely begs the question. One must confront first an accumulation of inharmonious data concerned with political relations within modern states. On the one hand, we find a good deal of evidence that appears to support Benedict Anderson's characterization of nations as imagined communities: "The nation is imagined as a community , because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings" (1983, 16). Various historical and journalistic accounts exist of collective national action that seems to express the broad-based communalism noted by Anderson.
Counterpoised to such evidence for the potency of national sentiment is a second body of research examining everyday resistance by political subordinates to local power or local expressions of supralocal domination. This analytical project, whose preeminent practitioner has been James Scott (1985, 1990), chronicles the omnipresent though often hidden existence of divergent interpretations and subversive discourses. Writes Scott in portraying everyday forms of ideological struggle: "The process by which any system of political or religious beliefs emanating from above is reinterpreted, blended with pre-existing beliefs, penetrated and transformed is characteristic of any stratified society . . . Deviant interpretations—ideological heterodoxy—are hardly astonishing when they arise among subordinate classes which, by definition, have the least stake in the official description of reality" (1985, 319).
These separate projects prompt one to ask how it is possible that members of subordinate classes, on the one hand, respond readily to nationalist calls to action and, on the other, routinely manage to penetrate elite rhetoric and subvert domination. Recent anthropological analyses of nations as imagined communities have sought to overcome
this problem by various means, very often by recourse to a concept that has been broadly employed to understand power relations in complex societies—that of "cultural hegemony."
Interrogating Hegemony
For the past decade, anthropological analyses of power relations in colonial and postcolonial societies have sought to transcend the antipodal notions of domination and resistance by detailing the complexity of social power and advancing a view of social order as a dynamic and uneven process.[1] While applying insights about discursive and nondiscursive practice from Michel Foucault (1978) and Pierre Bourdieu (1977), these efforts have often drawn prime inspiration from an earlier continental source: Antonio Gramsci's (1971) concept of hegemony, usually by way of the reading given it by Raymond Williams (1977). It is this notion of hegemony that has undergirded a number of recent anthropological investigations of nationalism (see, e.g., Brow 1988, 1990; Crain 1990; Fox 1989, 1990; B. Williams 1991; Swedenburg 1990, 1991; Toland 1993; Woost 1993). In the view of these analysts, nationalisms operate hegemonically to channel sentiment and mobilize antagonisms; or to state it the other way around, it is hegemony that constructs Anderson's "imagined communities." While subordinates are never merely passive recipients of nationalist ideas (they may reinterpret them in various ways to incorporate their specific political concerns), the dialogue between nationalist elites and ordinary adherents is distinctly asymmetric, with elites ultimately controlling both the production of nationalist ideas and the vehicles of their transmission.
The concept of cultural hegemony has acquired a range of utilization in social thought well beyond the immediate analytical intentions of the political theorist and activist credited with introducing it. Antonio Gramsci, writing from prison in the years between 1929 and his death in 1935, developed the concept of hegemony chiefly to explain why capitalism in the industrialized West had not yet collapsed as a result of its own inner contradictions (Gramsci 1971; see also Perry Anderson 1976; Laclau 1977). Despite Gramsci's concern with the peculiar characteristics of capitalist ideology in the liberal democracies of the industrialized West, his notion of hegemony began to be applied to dissimilar settings soon after his writings became available in English.[2] Cultural anthropologists came relatively late to the topic of cultural
hegemony but in recent years have embraced the concept in their analyses of social relations (see, e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Contursi 1989; Fox 1985, 1989; Lagos 1993; Linger 1993; Rebel 1989; Roseberry 1989, 1991 1994), often with specific reference to nationalism (see, e.g., Brow 1988, 1990; Crain 1990; Fox 1989, 1990; B. Williams 1991; Swedenburg 1990,1991; Woost 1993).
Despite hegemony's broad popularity in the social sciences, analysts have disagreed when interpreting its essential meaning. Definitions vary because, for one, Gramsci himself, as numerous commentators have noted, used the term inconsistently (see, e.g., Perry Anderson 1976; Abercrombie et al. 1980; Lears 1985).[3] If anything approaching an interpretive mainstream does exist, it may be found among those scholars who accent Gramsci's writings on the complexity of workingclass consciousness. That interpretive emphasis has been demonstrated most famously by Raymond Williams, first in a 1973 essay entitled Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory , and later in his 1977 Marxism and Literature .[4] In that first work, Williams offers his reading of hegemony as . . . "the central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived . . . [Hegemony] thus constitutes . . . a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of [a] society to move, in most areas of their lives . . ." ([1973] 1980, 38). The "dominant culture," however, is neither monolithic nor univocal: ". . . alternative meanings and values, . . . alternative opinions and attitudes, even some alternative senses of the world . . . can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture" (1980, 39).[5]
This eloquent formulation incorporates an apparent contradiction. For Williams, hegemony shapes the experience of subordinates to such an extent that it constitutes a sense of absolute reality for them; yet in some unspecified manner, the dominant culture also allows subordinates the opportunity to devise "alternative senses of the world."[6]
Williams's explication of hegemony in terms of a dominant culture has been quite influential among anthropologists, and most who employ the concept follow closely his usage.[7] Williams's reading of cultural hegemony has also guided various anthropological analyses of nationalism (see, e.g., Brow 1988, 1990; Crain 1990; Fox 1990; Swedenburg 1990, 1991; Toland 1993; Woost 1993).[8] These analysts tend to agree that subordinate classes are incorporated into the imagined community of the nation through nationalist discourses that work by
"articulating . . . the insecurities, preoccupations, hopes and fears of everyday consciousness" (Wright 1985, 175). Nationalist hegemony remains nonetheless vulnerable to challenges, primarily in the form of active assessments by subordinates of the claims and promises of nationalist leaders. In response, nationalist leaders make rhetorical and material concessions; however, these concessions never imperil the nationalist project itself. In the end, the dialogue of nationalist discourse is always a profoundly unequal one. Nationalist ideologies powerfully constitute individuals as subjects, with subordinates experiencing "a powerful reorganization of their common sense" as "these ideologies . . . become part of meaningful life" (Woost 1993, 516–17).
Before considering hegemony's relevance to nationalism, the concept itself requires closer examination. The notion of cultural hegemony depicts a dynamic process whereby systems of domination maintain themselves not only by means of rules and other coercions but by their profoundly formative effect on ordinary understandings of the social world. This depiction provokes a question: how do coercion and cultural hegemony interact to maintain a system of domination? Or, more to the point, how do we know when one or the other is operative? While Gramsci's writings are again inconsistent on this point, most anthropologists who employ the concept seem confident in their ability to discern hegemony at work.
James Scott, however, counsels utmost caution when attempting to disentangle the presumed ideological effects of cultural hegemony from the impositions of economic necessity and physical coercion. Domination, he notes, "produces an official transcript that provides convincing evidence of willing, even enthusiastic complicity" (1990, 86). Moreover, underclasses, for strategic purposes, avoid open defiance or the public discrediting of the official transcript's account of social relations. Most public events are thus available to researchers only in their official versions, as aspects of an elite-produced transcript in which exploitation appears natural and domination legitimate. Scott, for more than a decade the most energetic and articulate critic of the concept of hegemony, has drawn attention to the ubiquity of everyday resistance by subordinate classes. Such resistance includes a subtle but authentic ideological struggle in which "official descriptions of reality" are routinely "penetrated and transformed" (1985, 319) by subordinates who at the same time produce their own unauthorized "hidden transcript" of power relations (1990, 4).
Various anthropologist advocates of the hegemony concept have directly criticized Scott's views, arguing that by posing a dichotomy between domination and resistance he has failed to grasp "the complex dynamic nature of the hegemonic process" (Lagos 1993, 53).[9] In their formulations, cultural hegemony is said to encompass both domination and resistance. But what, precisely, is meant by that claim? The consensus opinion seems to be that while hegemony accommodates—even "thrives on"—discontent, it "makes revolution hard to think" (Linger 1993, 3, 4). Resistance and even rebellion can be accommodated within a system of domination because "webs of domination,"woven mainly through discursive practice, encompass subordinates even as they try to resist (Lazarus-Black and Hirsch 1994, 9). The result is "the experiential starvation of the political imagination," with most resisters co-opted from the start by their use of the dominant political rhetoric (Linger 1993, 18).
Scott, however, rejects the central assumption of his anthropological critics that hegemony inhibits the political imagination of subordinates, citing abundant local versions of "the world turned upside down" to support his assertion (1990, 80). He has argued that subordinates generally limit the scope of their resistance and couch their protests in the language of the dominant ideology for strategic reasons, not as a result of the cognitive constraints imposed by cultural hegemony. Those strategic considerations primarily concern the personal safety and economic survival of members of subordinate groups. Before looking to discursive practice to explain the relative quiescence of subalterns, due notice should first be given to the coercive force ready to be applied against them, their experiences of past failures of open opposition, and "their daily struggle for subsistence and the surveillance it entails" (Scott 1990, 86).[10]
Nothing in my reading of the Cotabato case supports a view of hegemony as encompassing both domination and resistance. As we shall see, Muslim subordinates in Cotabato have not depended on elite-generated language and images to make sense of power relations. Rank-and-file adherents of the Muslim separatist movement have routinely resisted official interpretations of events, often by means of imaginative narratives that served as charters for political decisions directly at odds with the directions of movement leaders. While it is prudent to approach dichotomous categories of social analysis such as domination/resistance with caution, overnuanced analyses of power
relations carry their own analytical distortions and produce mostly indeterminacy. To declare that hegemony comprises both domination and resistance removes an unwanted binary but reveals nothing about the sources and consequences of unroutinized insubordinations. In such a formulation, hegemony is incongruously imagined as an encapsulating dominant culture that is ever vulnerable to challenge yet ultimately imperishable, both constantly becoming and always already accomplished.
As this is the interpretation of hegemony most often employed to counter Scott's strong criticisms of the entire notion, there is good reason to remain unimpressed by claims made for hegemony as "a potent concept for the analysis of cultural order" (Woost 1993, 503). As noted, hegemony has been rather widely applied in anthropological investigations of nationalism. It remains to examine its performance in that analytical realm.
Hegemony, Nationalism, and the Investigation of Armed Separatism
Nationalist projects, and especially armed separatist movements, would seem particularly useful cases for evaluating the conflicting claims for the analytical utility of the concept of hegemony. After all, nationalist projects are, unavoidably, popular undertakings—projects that involve "inviting the masses into history" (Nairn 1977, 340). Though conceived from above by elites, armed nationalisms are incarnated on the ground by rank-and-file fighters and adherents struggling to replace one set of state-level elites with another, more familiar one.[11] In the absence of direct physical coercion, what motivates such perilous endeavors on the part of subordinates? How serviceable is the hegemony concept for understanding mobilization for armed separatism?
Armed secession is almost always an exceedingly hazardous undertaking, defying as it does an established state whose military might is usually far superior and whose reaction to attempted secession nearly always vengeful. Armed separatist struggles demand mortal sacrifices, requiring individual adherents "not so much to kill, as willingly to die" for the nationalist cause (Anderson 1983, 16).[12] That elite appeals to the "nation-as-community" (Foster 1991, 241) appear to move so many ordinary actors to collective and often costly action invites reliance on cultural hegemony as an analytical tool. The voluntary par-
ticipation of rank-and-file adherents in armed nationalist movements would seem to provide prima facie evidence for the motive force of resonant nationalist ideas.
Employing hegemony to understand armed nationalism is not, however, free of complications. For one, the notion of hegemony was originally devised to explain the political inertia of subordinate classes (those who had yet to launch a proletarian revolution in Gramsci's Western Europe), not their mobilization for collective action. Analyses of nationalist mobilization keyed to hegemony (or to kindred concepts—see, e.g., Bentley 1987; Kapferer 1988) do not of course employ it to explain political immobility on the part of subordinates but rather their engagement in "concerted, directed action" (Kapferer 1988, 83). Explaining collective action and accounting for social stasis are quite dissimilar undertakings. Successful collective action requires, in addition to an initial propellant, direction, containment, and continual remotivation. Adequate explanation of such action requires making sense of motion—of how political movements surge and subside and change course.
There are more practical problems as well when applying hegemony to the explanation of separatist movements. Separatist insurgencies in particular present certain methodological difficulties for ethnographers attempting to gain subordinate perspectives on ethnonational movements. Direct interviews of ordinary adherents tend to draw political statements exhibiting self-conscious attempts at correctness ranging from self-censorship to psittacism (see, e.g., Swedenburg 1991; Bowman 1993, 457, n. 19). That is to say, the likelihood is great that, under conditions of armed struggle, political questions posed to fighters and supporters will elicit only authorized answers—only the "official transcript" of political relations and events (Scott 1990).[13] There is, in addition, the problem of obtaining official permission to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in regions where the authority of the central state is actively contested. Such difficulties may account for the relative scarcity of ground-level ethnographic accounts of separatist insurgencies.[14]
It is a central irony of modern ethnonationalist movements that, though fashioned to disengage from totalizing, centralizing states, they invariably advance ideological projects mandating cultural and political homogenization within their own declared territories.[15] The personal costs of one such hegemonic project have been powerfully described by the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic, who describes
herself as "pinned to the wall of nationhood—not only by outside pressure from Serbia and the Federal Army but by national homogenization within Croatia itself" (1993, 51): "The trouble with this nationhood . . . is that whereas before, I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character—and, yes, my nationality too—now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because I am not a person any more. I am one of 4.5 million Croats." (1993, 51).
The formative and inhibitive effects of ethnonationalist movements on their ordinary adherents are evidenced most dramatically and coinstantaneously in armed secessionist struggles. The vindictive responses of state authorities to separatist movements, and the ferocious hostility of their militaries toward civilians suspected of seditionist leanings, substantiate separatist rhetoric and provide significant impetus for the creation of a transcendent national identity constituted in large measure on the possession of a common enemy (see Bowman 1993). At the same time, such struggles tend to create political environments comparable to that described by Drakulic in her observation that today "in Croatia it is difficult to be the kind of person who says, 'Yes, I am Croat, but . . .'" (1993, 51). That double-edged character of armed separatism—opening a new discursive space for imagining a transcendental (and oppositional) community while severely restricting the space for expressing other identities and concerns—suggests that listening for voiced dissension about the location of the crucial community should be a primary task for ethnographers attempting to assess the hegemonic force of nationalist ideas on such movements. It also, of course, renders the elicitation of dissident rank-and-file perspectives on armed nationalist movements through direct discourse especially problematic.
Such problems are prominently evidenced in Ted Swedenburg's study of popular memory among Palestinian peasants (1991, 1995). Swedenburg observes that in response to Israeli "repression of all manifestations of Palestinian identity," and in accord with official Palestinian nationalism's efforts to "marginalize the dissonant strands" of popular memory, his informants "couched popular-democratic statements in nationalist language, as divergent rather than oppositional versions of a national past" (1991, 165, 175). He also remarks that his informants felt that, through him, "they were addressing a U.S. audience, which they recognize as a powerful determinant of their situation . . . Accordingly, and in line with official discourse, informants often practiced self-censorship, presenting an image of the revolt suitable for
both national and foreign consumption" (1991, 172). Swedenburg's attempts to solicit "dissident strands" of popular memory among Palestinian peasants were thus effectively blocked by both the repressive context of his fieldwork environment and his own identification as a conduit to an American audience. When attempting to analyze his methodological difficulties, however, he turns to a version of cultural hegemony, noting, "Whereas I previously tended to regard nationalism as a discourse imposed from above, I have come to conceive of it as a joint construction of the popular classes and the leadership . . . All parties agree that [the] internal struggle [between Palestinian leaders and followers over various social issues] is secondary to the fight for national liberation" (emphasis mine, 1990, 28). One wonders exactly how Swedenburg is able to ascertain what "all parties" agree upon when those whose opinions most concern him are (as he has just informed us) practicing self-censorship.[16]
While the notion of cultural hegemony appears at first regard to hold promise for understanding ethnonational mobilization, the problems attendant on its application generally—how to disentangle the operation of coercion from that of hegemony, how to determine the political authenticity of the authorized narratives of power relations told by (and to) subordinates—are actually intensified in situations of armed separatism. One route around those problems is to seek out the equivalent of James Scott's "hidden transcript," the unauthorized, "offstage" discourse of subordinates (1990, 4). While not necessarily contradicting the official account of power relations, "a hidden transcript is produced for a different audience and under different constraints of power than the public transcript. By assessing the discrepancy between the hidden transcript and the public transcript [it becomes possible] to judge the impact of domination on public discourse" (Scott 1990, 5). The informal ways in which Campo Muslim residents speak to one another about the Muslim separatist movement constitute a discursive practice (a form of hidden transcript) that, while not fundamentally subversive of Muslim nationalist interests, does articulate a collateral view—one that includes, and often privileges, goals and identities different from those authorized by movement leaders. In particular, the unofficial songs and stories of the separatist rebellion have been discursive vehicles for independent evaluations of the separatist project and have sanctioned subordinate actions that, in some cases, have directly contravened the edicts of movement leaders. Songs composed by rank-and-file fighters proclaimed that they were
"fighting for the inged "—the local, face-to-face community—and made no mention of the Bangsamoro, or Philippine Muslim nation. Popular narratives of supernatural assistance provided to those fighting to defend Muslims from aggression spoke, in some cases, of divine mercy bestowed on individuals shunned by the rebel leadership and in others of the denial of divine assistance to officially approved rebels.
Analyses of nationalism have taken notice of the fact that the key-words of nationalist ideologies may be significantly altered in meaning while being absorbed by subordinate classes (see, e.g., Chatterjee 1993; Wright 1985). Unauthorized narratives of the Bangsamoro Rebellion spoken in Campo Muslim reveal not only the alteration of official descriptions of the separatist movement but the use of independent language as well—language expressing distance from the authorized aims of Muslim nationalism. The critical assessments made of the rebellion by ordinary adherents questioned not only the claims and promises of movement leaders but also their fundamental aims and assumptions.
The view from the ranks in Cotabato poses a direct challenge to the prevalent assumption that successful nationalist mobilization requires the ideological incorporation of ordinary adherents. Despite the notable misalignment between the official discourse of the rebellion and the language, perceptions, and intentions of its ordinary adherents, the Muslim separatist struggle in Cotabato has had considerable success. The practical compliance of subordinates is at least as consequential for successful mobilization. As we shall see, the practical compliance of ordinary adherents is based importantly on their possession of a common enemy but also on a host of collateral intentions: self-defense, defense of community, social pressure, armed coercion, revenge, and personal ambition, among others. The Cotabato material bolsters Scott's critique by questioning the utility of the concept of hegemony (as presented in most current usages) both for the analysis of ethnonationalism and for relations of domination in general. Even so, I am not so inclined as Scott to reject the notion entirely. There remains the need for a vocabulary for speaking about the relationship between physical coercion (broadly defined) and public political culture. Appropriately refashioned—by emphasizing, for example, its grounding in "everyday fear" (Sayer 1994, 374)—hegemony may usefully serve that purpose.[17]