genius loci

Our experience of culture is dependent on various parameters. But for a culture to be distinctly experienced, a delineation that cannot be empirically qualified, the greater challenge is establishing the sense of identity of a culture, or its society. For a culture to be a living, breathing, evolving one, its proponents or the population that it encompasses must find association with it. To associate then is to claim; to know without doubt or hesitation, ambiguity or irreverence, that this consciousness is the rhythm that defines their beat.

Often in this diluted world of technological faddism and the globalization phenomenon, people too easily and eagerly relinquish their endemic and vernacular cultures for the prize of a globally connected, inhumanely nonspecific, exhaustively inclusive consumerist paradigm, a crass dilution of cultures into one capitalistic and overtly, inherently, selfish consciousness. Where the idea of culture becomes synonymous with the self; that one’s culture can only be defined through the material and immediate – the property you own, the influence you command, the objects you possess and the assertion of individuality. This narcissistic view of the cultural context becomes the status quo of the current.

But when everyone is unique, noone is.

Culture becomes a mere tool to differentiate the social classes, a contemporary caste system meant to objectify life as a sequence of objectives and itineraries, a superficial exploration into the self-aggrandizing exercise of human innovation, its supposed triumph over nature, over self, and over his fellowmen.

But this is not culture. This is consumerism.

There are very few places in our country that remain resilient against the gripping claws of consumerism. Most of our cultural havens have fallen prey to disuse, mismanagement and exploitation that the essence of the place, its genius loci, becomes lost in the muddle of tourism and cultural prostitution, selling exoticism as a form of backward third-world curiosity to the highest, most invasive bidder. The places that remain intact and undisturbed are the very sort of places I dream of visiting, of being able to walk along worn paths crossing time and generation, and not by rubber and steel. Those places are rare and endangered. Such a place is Batanes.

What makes Batanes singular and significant in this debate is more than the sum of its salient and sentient characteristics. It is beyond what our young generation can fully grasp or comprehend, and all I can offer are but a few of the reasons why this place, its local flavor and the encompassed culture is noteworthy and worth protecting.

It’s more than the fact that unlike other culturally significant locales, Batanes has the advantage of isolation. Its distanciation ensured and continues to ensure that the foibles of mass consumerism is deterred and protected against, that the content of its landscape and the beauty of its endemic culture remain as pristine as possible.

It’s more than its breathtaking scapes, its otherworldly milieu that inspires artists and intellectuals as much as it does tourists and locals, that the environment it presents is so geographically unique and distinct that one would be hardpressed to find anything remotely varied and verdant as this in the whole archipelago. An experience of the senses that borders on the spiritual.

It’s more than the local culture that continually thrives, not as museumified remnants of a bygone era, refurbished, retained, conserved and preserved like some artifact for perusal, but as a genuine example of a living culture, one that did not merely survive but persevered, amidst the harsh climate, the battering of modernity, and the threats of obsolescence. It is a culture that is alive, an exemplar that the old need not be obsolete, and the local doesn’t necessarily mean lowly. It is seen in its houses and paths, in its huts and halls, in the bosoms of its landscape that kiss the sea and in the peaks of its hills that exalt the sky.

It is all of these and much more. Because places like Batanes are rare and unique, that to miss out on the opportunity of experiencing it would be to deny the chance to experience culture in its finest – as pure and unadulterated, as honest as it is majestic, and as beautiful as it is generous.

They say to visit a place foreign and distant allows one to reach epiphanies, that the mind expands with the breath of a different air, that the heart becomes attuned to the divine, open and welcoming to the celestial and temporal while the feet walk along alien soil and unthreaded paths.

What’s remarkable about Batanes is that it is as foreign as it is Filipino, as alien as it is accessible, as novel an experience as the agelessness of its place, and as unknown as it is amiable. It is a place where the genius loci (sense of place) truly occurs. Because beyond what it shows us as proof of the richness of our culture, it affords us to peak into the divine, the unfathomable. The genius of nature, and the fortitude of man.

As a design professional, the esthetic is a concept that is often too explored and analyzed that it is too convenient for one to be jaded. To believe that beauty is a conception of man, and that creativity is a universal trait. But beauty also lies in nature, way beyond what we cannot conceive, and culture lies not in the halls and museums, nor auditoriums and screens, but in the paths of old that cross with the new, in places that envelope the sense of identity not by the physical remnants and ruminations of our consciousness, but by the intangible essence of its experience. Its genius loci that is imprinted not just in the landscape or its architecture, but also in its people and its culture. That to be global is not to be unique. To be global, is to be Filipino.

This is the reason why I’d like to visit Batanes. To be reminded of how it is to be Filipino.

Image from here.
Know more about South East Asian Airlines (SEAIR) in their Facebook Fan Page here.
Experience Batanes in its best time, during its winter season between December to February. SEAIR flies to Batanes twice daily during this period. To book a flight now, and to learn more about Batanes, visit the SEAIR website here.

To date, SEAIR has refused to include my entry to the Batanes Blogger's Contest. Sadly, this entry seems to have been written in vain. Add to the fact that votation is by 'liking' on Facebook. And since I don't have, and refuse to open, a Facebook account, this whole exercise appears to be a lesson on futility and the superficiality of random writing contests parading as legitimate literary endeavors, when what they really are is simply a popularity contest made convenient by the asinine and pretentiousness of a well-wrapped marketing ploy. Kudos to SEAIR and the organizers in once more, strengthening my lack of faith in the social networking paradigm.