Ruling Ideas and The Popular Imagination

To explore the message of the Cotabato case for theories of cultural domination let me return first to the precolonial order in Cotabato. The myth of sanctified inequality entitled an aristocracy to rule Cotabato Muslims based on its members' ancestral ties to the Prophet Muhammad. Written genealogies—the tarsilas—served as ideological instruments providing "proofs of legitimacy" for the ruling elite (Majul 1973, 3). The core principle of this dominant ideology of sacred ancestry was maratabat (status honor) and its primary dynamic was rank competition within the aristocracy itself.

Ethnohistorical accounts suggest that the myth of sanctified inequality, and the struggle for status it generated, operated primarily to incorporate the precolonial ruling class, penetrating to a much lesser extent among members of the underclasses (compare Abercrombie et al. 1980). Moreover, those aspects of the dominant ideology directed squarely at Muslim subordinates, the legal codes (Luwaran) and the assertion that subjects (sakup ) were under the protection of the aristocracy, seem to have been routinely penetrated by Muslim subordinates. Their direct experience of arbitrary punishments and the predations of datus confuted the official transcript of social relations between rulers and subjects. That experiential knowledge remained unspoken (and is only hesitatingly related even today) because of the mortal dangers risked by its telling. Awareness of the existence of hidden transcripts of power relations in precolonial Cotabato (as well as in contemporary Southeast Asia—Scott 1985) challenges those depictions of the precolonial polities of Southeast Asia that rely solely upon official texts or

aristocratic memories for the interpretation of traditional rule (see, e.g., Geertz 1980; Wolters 1982; Milner 1982; Errington 1989).

What of the more fundamentally hegemonic qualities of premodern rule, those taken-for-granted features of the system of subjection that, in the conceptual scheme of Comaroff and Comaroff (1992) and others, would have been far removed from the public proclamations of the dominant ideology of sanctified inequality? Various candidates present themselves, among them the correlation drawn between communities (ingeds) and datus, such that it was difficult (though not impossible) to imagine a community without a ruling datu. Another was the social distinction drawn between slaves (ulipun or banyaga) and nonslave commoners (endatuan), or that between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects. To what extent did such cultural meanings and practices reproduce domination by naturalizing it? Undoubtedly some, but attempting to sort out the incorporative effects of those meanings from the material constraints of armed coercion and legal insecurity (manifested in the ever-present threat of expropriation or reduction to slavery) seems an impossible task given the paucity of historical evidence.

There may also be found in traditional Cotabato a distinct set of imaginative representations of rule emanating from below that appear to have had hegemonic effects. These are the symbolizations of power independently generated by Muslim subordinates. They include, most prominently, the monstrous aspect of Datu Utu and marvelous abilities of Datu Piang, but they also include stories of fantastic powers possessed by various contemporary datus. The endogenous character of these popular images of rule is strikingly illustrated in Campo Muslim. There poor Muslims routinely disregarded and often disparaged the ideological assertions of the Magindanaon aristocracy while simultaneously relishing and retelling stories of the supernatural potency of various datus, living and dead.

While both critics and proponents of the concept of hegemony have noted that subordinates routinely reinterpret components of dominant ideologies, anthropologists in particular have scarcely discussed the theoretical implications of independently generated popular imagings of rule.^[1] Among other social analysts, Jon Elster especially has pointed to "endogenous preference formation" as an important phenomenon in social life (1985, 21). He is referring here to the cognitive process whereby "subjects invent their own mystification" by producing beliefs that justify their subjugation (1993, 65). The psychic mechanism that generates such beliefs is, according to Elster, the tendency to

"reduce cognitive dissonance" (1985, 466) or to attempt to attain peace of mind. Following Elster's schema, the belief of Cotabato subordinates in the supernatural attributes of ruling datus reduced dissonance by placing power out of reach for those with only normal human properties, and thus served as a form of consolation. There are, however, other significances of independent belief formation by political subordinates insufficiently addressed by Elster. Popular imagings of rule such as those found among Muslim subordinates in Cotabato should be seen as creative responses to the direct experience of domination. They do not rely on the representations or even the language of ruling elites. Neither do they simply refract the dominant ideology or naturalize a set of social conditions. Instead, they denaturalize social power by portraying it as depending upon profoundly unequal allotments of supernatural attributes. While such beliefs may, as Elster proposes, serve to reproduce structures of domination, they are, in the Cotabato case, also directly counterhegemonic. For one, they explicitly contradict the dominant myth of sanctified inequality by endowing only certain manifestly forceful members of the Cotabato nobility with extraordinary traits. Additionally, insofar as these endowments (unlike the persuasions of the dominant culture) are independently conferred by subordinates, they may also be unilaterally withdrawn.