[Time Trowel] The power to define history is shifting back to communities

A trowel (/ˈtraʊ.əl/), in the hands of an archaeologist, is like a trusty sidekick – a tiny, yet mighty, instrument that uncovers ancient secrets, one well-placed scoop at a time. It’s the Sherlock Holmes of the excavation site, revealing clues about the past with every delicate swipe.

On April 30, 1904, the empire introduced itself to the public.

At the St. Louis World’s Fair, the Philippine Exposition made the case that the Philippines needed the United States. The US had recently taken control of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. The transition was violent and contested. As the US was borne out of an anti-imperialist sentiment, there was a need to make sense of it at home. The exposition offered an answer framed through the language of the White Man’s Burden and what American officials called benevolent assimilation.

Visitors walked through reconstructed villages where people from the Philippines carried out everyday activities. They cooked, built houses, performed rituals, and moved through routines under constant observation. They participated in a staged argument.

On one side were the performances of the Philippine Constabulary Band, composed of lowland Christianized Filipinos. They wore uniforms, played structured compositions, and followed a conductor with precision. Their bandleader, an African American (Walter Howard Loving), added another component to the display, showing how the United States positioned itself as capable of organizing colonial subjects within a broader imperial order.

Elsewhere in the exposition, several Philippine communities, including the Igorots, were presented in ways that emphasized difference. Visitors were encouraged to watch practices framed as unusual or unfamiliar, including the consumption of dog meat and ritual activities detached from their social contexts. These were not presented as part of a coherent system of knowledge. They were isolated to produce contrast.

On one side was discipline, order, and something recognizable to American audiences. On the other was a portrayal of distance from that order. The juxtaposition suggested movement from one to the other, with the United States positioned as the guide.

This is particularly significant in the Cordillera, a region where Spanish administration had never fully taken hold. The exposition reframed that history. Instead of highlighting autonomy, it presented the region as a space waiting to be brought into a broader system.

For many Americans, this was their first sustained encounter with the Philippines. What they encountered was not the Philippines as lived. It was a version arranged for interpretation. Visitors left with the impression that people from the Philippines needed help to advance, that they were not ready for self-rule, and that the US presence would bring education and progress. Responsibility and control were made to look the same.

These impressions were produced through spatial arrangement and performance. The Philippines entered the American imagination through a framework that made hierarchy appear natural.

That framework did not end in 1904. Anthropology has played a role in shaping and sustaining it. That history calls for a reckoning within the discipline.

If that is the case, then it is worth revisiting what anthropology claims to be. At its core, anthropology is about people. We even call them interlocutors, which is a long way of saying we are supposed to be in conversation with them, not simply writing about them. The history of the field tells a different story. People were studied, categorized, and written into narratives that often left them out of the conversation.

We like to think those days are behind us. But the habits linger. Sometimes as knowledge production. Sometimes as a preference for staying within academic circles. It is easier that way. 

You get your degree. You get your tenure. You publish. You build a career from knowledge that came from somewhere, often from people who trusted you with their time and experience. At the end of it, there might be a thank you in the acknowledgments.

But engagement is harder. It takes time. It can be uncomfortable. It means being accountable to the people we work with. It requires listening, adjusting, and occasionally admitting that we got things wrong. It also requires stepping outside the inward-looking habits that can make scholarship appear inclusive while remaining closed in practice.

Engagement, in this context, goes beyond outreach and asks for a two-way process grounded in time, trust, and shared effort, and, when taken seriously, it produces outcomes that extend beyond publications. The Ifugao Indigenous Peoples Education (IPED) Center is one example. It did not emerge from a single project or individual but from years of conversations, fieldwork, negotiations, and shared meals, where ideas moved between stories and practice, sometimes over Red Horse and bayah, and I can confirm participation in the eating and drinking.

The IPED Center is now a space where students learn about their history in ways that connect directly to their lives, placing culture within everyday understanding rather than at a distance. Alongside it are related efforts shaped by the same process, including the Kiangan Community Heritage Volunteers, who carry out the day-to-day work of documenting sites and guiding visitors, and the Kiyyangan Weavers Association, where knowledge continues through practice.

These are not large in the way academia tends to measure impact, but they are working initiatives that exist, function, and continue. They also involve many people, not only Marlon Martin and not only me, but students, community members, local government units, elders, and groups like SITMO, who have been part of this work from the beginning, the same people who do work while others just write about it.

This is not about claiming credit, but about recognizing that when communities take the lead and the academe shows up, listens, and stays long enough, something useful can take shape, and it is in these kinds of efforts that we begin to see a shift.

At the Fowler Museum, the Mountain Spirits exhibit, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, reflects this approach. Curated by Marlon Martin, it draws from long-term relationships founded on collaboration and accountability, and it does not place Ifugao communities in a distant past. Instead, it presents terraces as working landscapes, rituals as part of social life, and identity as something carried and reshaped across time and place, without relying on a developmental ladder that positions communities along a fixed scale.

In doing so, it moves away from earlier frameworks that once helped justify empire and replaces them with a recognition that communities are not subjects of history but active participants in it. This shift also raises a broader challenge for the discipline. Anthropology was shaped in part by extractive practices in the early 20th century, and traces of that model remain, but there is no requirement to continue along that path, even if it is more convenient.

What is at stake is not the adoption of another framework, but accountability. It involves returning to the community, sharing results in ways that matter, supporting local initiatives, and ensuring that the work continues beyond the field season. In practice, it can be as straightforward as recognizing that when people share their time, knowledge, and trust, the relationship does not end with data collection.

The question of who defines the past remains, but what is changing is that more communities are now actively shaping the answer. – Rappler.com

Stephen B. Acabado is professor of anthropology at the University of California-Los Angeles. He directs the Ifugao and Bicol Archaeological Projects, research programs that engage community stakeholders. He grew up in Tinambac, Camarines Sur.