"Liberation Theology in the Philippines: Faith in a Revolution’’ (2004) by Kathleen M. Nadeau is an informative and insightful study which demonstrates that the application of conventional development paradigms overlooks the suffering and displacement experienced by people in the periphery for whom social and economic structure and policies are supposed to help. It highlights the Basic Ecclesial Community (BEC) movement in Cebu as an alternative strategy in building and sustaining a just and community-oriented society.

John A. Larkin summarizes Nadeau’s treatise in his Foreword: By now poverty has become so ingrained and so widespread that probably no president alone, even if she or he possessed good intentions, could improve the situation. Self-serving local and national politicians and many members of the social and economic elite hold back change; moreover, the poor have in many cases lost hope and become immobilized in the struggle for a better life. The problems of poverty has become so ingrained in the social fabric that major attitudinal as well as social, economic, political, and legal changes must occur to relieve the situation. (p. vii)

What must be done? Larkin—as Nadeau—believes that the Filipinos’ only hope in transforming their nation is to change from within, in the poor’s as well as the religious communities’ prevailing attitude to their predicament towards that of revisioning their concept of social solidarity, the communal spirit espoused by native liberation theologians and manifested in the Philippines’ history of millennial and socialist movements.

Kathleen M. Nadeau is an assistant professor and applied anthropology coordinator at California State University in San Bernardino, CA. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology at Arizona State University.

"Celebrating the Centennial of Independence: Postcolonial National Identity in the Philippines’’ (2004), the Philippine edition of an Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Book by Greg Bankoff and Kathleen Weekley, presents a fresh understanding of the construction of postcolonial national identity in the new context of globalization. Here, the authors look at the dilemma of the requirement to compete in the global economy and the political demands of human rights and cultural differences. They likewise show how a modern state attempts to mold the identities of its citizens and how the myriad of identities in a multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural society give rise to intense contradictions.

The authors, in their Preface to the Philippine edition, tell Filipinos what the book is all about: [I]t looks at the approach that those in government and positions of influence took to represent the past and portray "the nation" on an occasion they decided to make into an epochal event in the "story" of their "people." It discusses the reasons why the Philippine Revolution of 1896-98 was chosen to perform this service and how the program of associated activities attempted to create an all-inclusive rendition of the past deemed suitable for a modern nationstate. (p. x)

In conclusion, the authors suggest: [T]he construction of an alternative Filipino identity that transcends ascriptive or given national qualities, and stresses Filipinos’ enduring faith in civil rights and the resilience of the democratic process. … it is also that the state creates not only symbolic structures of solidarity, but also a material reality to the imagined community, through the implementation of economic and social rights. It is in the extension of such principles that are both relevant and measurable to all of its citizens that we feel the Filipino state’s best hopes may lie in fostering a sense of national belonging in the new century. (Ibid.)

Greg Bankoff, a social and environmental historian of Southeast Asia and co-editor of Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People (Earthscan, 2004) with Georg Frerks and Dorothea Hilhorst, is associate professor in the School of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Kathleen Weekley, PhD, is senior research fellow at the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She authored The Communist Party of the Philippines, 1968-1993: A Story of Its Theory and Practice (University of the Philippines Press, 2002) and is currently researching intraAsian nonprofessional labor migration and politics of the creation of a Filipino Diaspora. For inquiries and details on the two titles, contact Joy Villareal, DLSU Press sales representative.