Conclusion

What, finally, does the Cotabato case contribute to the broader debate about cultural domination and resistance? On one hand, the evidence from Cotabato provides superficial support to those who argue, contra

James Scott (1985, 1990), that domination and resistance should not be imagined as discrete categories nor should their cultural expressions be dichotomized into public versus hidden transcripts. Cultural domination in Cotabato has been embedded, to some extent, in everyday designations and distinctions as well as in the more formal assertions of power holders. Resistance has not only been found hidden away in private transcripts but also has been expressed, at least occasionally, in the public dialogue. These readily observable exceptions to the strict dichotomization of domination and resistance are joined in Cotabato by a less obvious one: the development of images of rule endogenous to Muslim subordinates, demonstrating that the private, unofficial transcript of power relations may serve to reproduce as well as express resistance to those relations.

On the other hand, important aspects of the Cotabato case do not sustain arguments for hegemony as a potent concept for the analysis of cultural order. For one, it offers no strong evidence for the political effects of the central ideological operation claimed for hegemony—the naturalization of the existing order. While some naturalization is indicated in that Muslim subordinates have tended to accept domination as a fact of life, it is far from clear that their acceptance of the inevitability of domination in general has played any significant role in maintaining particular social orders. As we have seen, endogenous collective representations of rule have actually denaturalized social power, an imaginative operation that exhibits counterhegemonic potential.

Neither is there much support to be found for the postulated correlate of naturalization, the "experiential starvation of the political imagination" of subordinates (Linger 1993, 18). Ordinary Muslims have been well able to imagine political realities alternative to those envisioned by their rulers. That such images have not resulted in a fully formed and publicly articulated vision of a social order that counters the predominant version does not diminish in the least their political significance. These independent cultural productions do demonstrate that Muslim subordinates have not been paralyzed (in imagination or action) by elite-generated political discourse.

The political imaginations of ordinary Muslims reflect their experiential knowledge. The daily life of political subordinates consists of more than ritual practices within taken-for-granted social configurations. It is also made up of historical events that test the core assumptions of the dominant culture. Subordinates' "experienced encounters with the limits of their own culture" and its sometimes savage

incongruities create opportunities for insight and "the possibility of creative innovative practice" (Rebel 1989, 125).^[7]

The materials from Cotabato suggest that those who depict hegemony as both vulnerable and imperishable have gotten it half right. Whether or not a particular array of dominant meanings has accomplished the ideological incorporation of a set of political subordinates is more properly an empirical question than an epistemological assumption. There is plentiful evidence from Cotabato of what may be termed failures of hegemony—"points of rupture, areas where a common discursive framework cannot be achieved" (Roseberry 1994, 366). Such ruptures are most apparent in the hegemonic project of the Muslim nationalist movement. There, rank-and-file adherents routinely resisted official interpretations of events, often by means of independent imaginative narratives that served as charters for political decisions directly at odds with the directions of movement leaders. Ordinary Muslims did not depend on elite-generated language and images to make sense of power relations. They were in no sense paralyzed by contradictory consciousness.

It is not at all difficult to find hegemony in the sense of attempted cultural domination at work in Cotabato. All who have sought to control Cotabato—both indigenous and external rulers—have had hegemonic projects. Such a project is most clearly evidenced, again, in the Muslim nationalist movement. Movement leaders articulated a coherent nationalist narrative intended to mobilize ordinary Muslims to rally to the separatist cause. While the separatist insurgents did gain a broad popular following, that successful mobilization had relatively little to do with the resonance of their nationalist message. A great number of factors motivated individual Muslims to fight for or otherwise support the armed separatist movement—self-defense, revenge, plunder, defense of local communities, social pressure, armed coercion, and personal ambition, among others. The idea of fighting for the Bangsamoro—for a nation of Philippine Muslims united by culture and history—was but one of those motivating factors and, if we use the popular songs and stories of the rebellion as indicators, not an especially potent one.

Those who observe the partial and often insignificant nature of everyday resistance and envision a web of cultural domination inexorably entrapping subordinates even as they attempt to resist provide a poetic but inapt metaphor. The weak, as James Scott (1985) reminds us, do not struggle helplessly but have their own weapons, among

them the critical and imaginative faculties with which to cut through or dissolve the discursive snares of the powerful. Just the same—and despite hegemony proponents' useful reminders of the fragility of power—it must be remembered that the powerful do possess arsenals of their own with weapons quite capable of dispensing unambiguously deadly force. It is the difficulty of disentangling the effects of cultural domination from those of the more physical sort that has most vexed advocates of the hegemony concept (including Antonio Gramsci himself).

Derek Sayer has commented recently on the relationship between compliance and coercion in some remarks toward a reconceptualization of the notion of hegemony. He begins with an example drawn from Václav Havel—that of a Prague greengrocer who hangs a sign in his window saying "Workers of the World Unite."

Havel's greengrocer had no interest in the fate of the international proletariat; he was merely participating in a ritual. But the "merely" is deceptive . . . We cannot infer from the greengrocer's likely nonbelief in what the sign says that his action is meaningless . For his displaying the sign—or more dramatically, failing to do so—sent out signals, clear to all . . . What displaying the sign signified was his willingness to conform, to participate in the established order as if its representations were reality. It also said, in a language all could read, that the greengrocer shared a real sociality with others, that of living the lie itself. (1994, 374)

Sayer observes further that while such "knowing complicity" does not constitute ideological incorporation (and is, in fact, "the exact opposite of 'false consciousness'"), these "ritual accommodations . . . disempower their participants, and the participants know this, too" (1994, 374). Hegemony, in Sayer's usage, resumes its inceptive Gramscian sense of consent to rule. Its power' lies in the process of consenting itself. The act of publicly accepting the representations of rule as social reality diminishes individuals—by splitting public from private selves—and shapes social life by producing and reproducing "quite material forms of sociality" based on collective complicity (1994, 374). The source of hegemony's power, however, "is also exactly what is most fragile about [it], precisely because it does depend on people living what they much of the time know to be a lie" (1994, 377).

Sayer's thoughts on hegemony are both intriguing and unsatisfying. The cynicism displayed by Havel's greengrocer, while anticipated in a Stalinist panopticon, is probably not the most accurate exemplification of political subordinates on the whole. Nor does "living a lie" provide

a complete description of the public selves of subordinates. As we have seen in Cotabato, subalterns may both invent their own mystification and engage in subtle negotiations with power-holders over the contours of social reality.^[8]

All the same, Sayer has provided a critical insight into the hegemony concept—one pointedly illustrated by the material from Cotabato. For Sayer, the "moment of consent" that Gramsci termed "hegemony" is always a public moment. Hegemony references public consent to rule—consent expressed in public rituals. The power of hegemony lies not in its saturation of individual interiors but in the act of public accommodation to dominant representations. That power has two forms, one immediate and the other indirect. Public enactments of consent are directly useful for rulers in terms of the mobilization of bodies (if not minds) for particular purposes. They are also indirectly efficacious (and this is where Sayer proceeds beyond James Scott). Public accommodations to rule also reproduce domination insofar as the outward acceptance of dominant representations as social reality systematically disempowers subjects by making them collective (and conscious) accomplices in their own subjugation. Their public consent, however, is not the result of paralysis but of active (though very narrowly constrained) decisions.

With Sayer's comments in mind, there are at least three additional inferences to be drawn from the Cotabato case in respect to cultural domination and resistance. First, as Sayer observes, public acceptance of the representations of the dominant order stems from "everyday fear" (of ever-present coercions) but also from the promise of individual empowerments (Sayer 1994, 376). Ritual accommodations may be made either to avoid losses (of individual freedom or property) or to obtain access to various enabling resources. It follows that accommodations to ruling representations, whether by local elites to colonial control or by underclasses to local domination, are all of a kind and should be considered together. The accommodations to power observed in Cotabato—both of local elites to external rule and of Muslim subjects to indigenous leaders—comprised a single process operating at two levels. Cotabato Muslims have signaled their acquiescence to rule in manifold public rituals, displaying themselves as subjects of a sultan or as America's Moros or as citizens of the Bangsamoro. In every case, their acceptance of the social reality of the moment has been motivated less by the persuasiveness of the official discourse of the powerful than by other considerations. For Muslim elites, who had

their presumed control of political subordinates with which to bargain, public submission to external rule was often exchanged for access to symbolic and material resources. The accommodations of ordinary Muslims stemmed more directly from the profoundly coercive nature of everyday life, and some of those coercions were not only explicitly recognized but also independently symbolized by subordinates. Yet for ordinary Muslims as well, public consent was also given to obtain access to resources: primarily protection but also economic resources and entertainment.

A second inference concerns everyday understandings, "practices and expectations" (Williams 1977, 110)—all of the more nondiscursive, taken-for-granted elements that occupy such an important place in various formulations of the hegemony concept. If, however, the focus is public consent and its consequences, then such everyday understandings are more straightforwardly theorized as aspects of material coercion, broadly conceived, rather than of hegemony. The organization of time and space within which individuals live their lives may have consequences that are profoundly coercive even if not fully recognized as such. "Power enforces the terms on which things must be done at the most everyday of levels" (Sayer 1994, 375). Muslim subordinates in Cotabato have found it difficult (though again, not impossible) to imagine a community (inged) not ruled by an autocratic datu because they have never been free of autocratic datus. They perceive an important social distinction between themselves and ordinary Christians at least in part because their treatment at the hands of the Philippine state has been so much worse than that of ordinary Christians. These examples constitute just the reverse of the "cultural shaping of experience" claimed for hegemony (Linger 1993, 4). On the contrary, the experiences of Muslim subjects have shaped their cultural perceptions.

Finally, a conception of hegemony stressing the distinction between public consent and private lives allows ample room for genuine resistance in spite of the disempowering effects of ritual accommodations. As we have seen, that resistance need not only be isolated but may, under certain circumstances be collectively expressed and acted upon. In Cotabato as in Havel's Czechoslovakia, the most politically consequential messages sent by subordinates were not those intended for official eyes and ears.