The Philippines Is Not a Small Country

The Philippines Is Not a Small Country

This book is an exploration of the Philippines as a beautiful land, a home to a diversity of peoples, a nation-in-the-making, and a country at the heart of the world. Drawing from anthropology, history, contemporary events, popular culture, and the author’s field experiences and travels, the essays draw connections between nature and culture, self and society, the local and the global, as well as the past and the present in order to arrive at a deeper, fuller, critical, yet hopeful view of a country that is larger than many imagine it to be. "Wide-ranging, well-considered, and, above all, thought-provoking and empathetic, the essays collected in The Philippines is Not a Small Country tackle major as well as quotidian issues, from the war on drugs to human-nature entanglements, from cyberculture to politics as “teleserye,” from racism, colorism, and heightism to “Bawal ang umihi dito” signs, the art of habal-habal riding, and concepts of “Filipino time,” tambay , tagay , pantawid-gutom , pasalubong , and utang na loob . A doctor and medical anthropologist by training, a writer and public intellectual by vocation, Gideon Lasco is attentive to the nuances and resilience of Filipino life-, place-, and meaning-making, even as this book amply fulfills the Rizalian injunction to reproduce the conditions of our country faithfully while keeping always the world in perspective." —Caroline S. Hau Published by Bughaw, an imprint of Ateneo de Manila University Press Nick Joaquin had written on our supposed 'heritage of smallness,; and this book certainly does not inherit that. Lasco, like all worthy essayists, writes and thinks in the National, in bold cinemascope or pure iMax. At a time when young writers try to carve epics out of the trivial under the guise of hauteur irony, he is unafraid to discourse on the grand, and consistently manages to shed fresh erudition on seemingly overanalyzed, cliched social issues sans the preachiness. He takes on the big boys: patriotism, history, the environment, politics, human rights, etc. but even for fripperies like fanatical basketball fans, our dietary sugar intake, the tambay, the selfie, Facebook, Pokémon Go―the ambition of these essays is anything but Lilliputian. The Philippines is not a small country. Gideon Lasco, columnist, MD, PhD, (he has more degrees than a thermometer, to use an old joke) knows whereof he speaks: aside from being a medical anthropologist, he is also an obsessive mountaineer who to my knowledge has scaled more mountains in the Philippines than anyone else. See? For some reason, it’s the writing doctors who see the bigger picture. Always the damn doctors. -- Lourd De Veyra Gideon Lasco is a physician, medical anthropologist, writer, and mountaineer. He obtained his MD from the University of the Philippines and his PhD from the University of Amsterdam. He is currently a senior lecturer at University of the Philippines Diliman's Department of Anthropology and a research fellow at the Ateneo de Manila University's Development Studies Program. A Palanca-winning essayist, he maintains a weekly column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, where he writes about health, culture, politics, and society.