1 00:00:00,690 --> 00:00:04,470 To people who do that so well. 2 00:00:04,770 --> 00:00:07,770 This is the fourth and final trip to Seminole. 3 00:00:07,830 --> 00:00:15,120 In return, we've had two speakers who took specialists and two who are known to be subject to its apologists. 4 00:00:15,640 --> 00:00:20,670 It's something to say about treasure discovery. The first of those was Charles Stewart, 5 00:00:20,670 --> 00:00:23,999 who gave us a remarkable account of the new anthropology of history that he's 6 00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:29,340 built around his work on treasure discovery in Greece and Bulgaria and elsewhere. 7 00:00:29,460 --> 00:00:32,010 That's been very well received. Then we had Katherine Hardy. 8 00:00:32,850 --> 00:00:40,110 We spoke about the budget setback in Tibet and how they were used to draw Chinese students. 9 00:00:40,260 --> 00:00:43,820 Tibetan Buddhism. Then we had read really closely. 10 00:00:43,950 --> 00:00:51,450 You might know. And she spoke about themes of treasure recovery in across a wide part of the world. 11 00:00:52,290 --> 00:00:56,519 And now I'm delighted to welcome the second drawn to Bitmoji anthropologist Dr. 12 00:00:56,520 --> 00:01:01,470 Pierce Kelly from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, 13 00:01:02,100 --> 00:01:08,670 where he's part of the Minds and Traditions research group that explores the origins and evolution of graphic codes. 14 00:01:09,620 --> 00:01:15,500 In his research interest mainly focuses on language writing systems and creative agency, 15 00:01:16,070 --> 00:01:23,060 in particular his interest in the varied ways in which speakers invent or manipulate symbolic systems to adapt to change circumstances. 16 00:01:24,240 --> 00:01:30,120 And at the Mint Research Group, he's exploring a number of recent writing systems invented by national non-profit, 17 00:01:30,120 --> 00:01:36,660 small scale societies in West Africa and Asia Pacific, several of which are revealed by visionary methods. 18 00:01:38,050 --> 00:01:48,040 And that is of great interest to Himalayan and Tibetan studies people because we find similar phenomena several times in the Himalayas and Tibet. 19 00:01:50,210 --> 00:01:55,790 And Piers is also curator and founder of the Australian Message Message Sticks database, 20 00:01:56,630 --> 00:02:01,940 which is a repository in progress of all known message states located in museums around the world. 21 00:02:01,940 --> 00:02:10,460 And we are really delighted that he was able to visit a picture of his museum during his current visit instead of the message that's there. 22 00:02:11,620 --> 00:02:19,179 Among many articles, Piers is author of the also not being legible invented writing systems as technologies of resistance 23 00:02:19,180 --> 00:02:25,030 in mainland Southeast Asia and also excavating a hidden bill story from the Philippines. 24 00:02:25,450 --> 00:02:28,960 A revised narrative of cultural, linguistic loss and recuperation. 25 00:02:30,160 --> 00:02:35,950 And it was in reading those articles that we thought we'd better invite you, because this rang so many bells. 26 00:02:36,250 --> 00:02:40,440 No pun intended, with many things that happened in Tibetan Himalayas. 27 00:02:41,740 --> 00:02:44,990 Thanks very much for and thank you all for coming. 28 00:02:45,010 --> 00:02:49,360 On the last day of time at 5:00 when we could be in the pub. 29 00:02:50,410 --> 00:02:55,780 So today I'm going to be talking about a centuries old treasure hunting tradition from the Philippines. 30 00:02:55,780 --> 00:03:00,430 And I'm going to first focus on how the tradition is expressed in folklore. 31 00:03:02,110 --> 00:03:06,010 But I also want to look at how it plays out in everyday life and events. 32 00:03:06,040 --> 00:03:15,880 I really love folklore. I see it as a dynamic tradition, as something that's not just narrated, but it's enacted and re-enacted and reinvented. 33 00:03:17,440 --> 00:03:24,099 And folklore is sometimes invoked a distinction between legends which are assumed to be myths, 34 00:03:24,100 --> 00:03:29,499 which are stories that are understood to be fanciful by their narrators and their listeners and legends, 35 00:03:29,500 --> 00:03:35,049 which are at least purported to be based on historical events. 36 00:03:35,050 --> 00:03:42,580 And the audience is invited to believe. I'm going to be exploring some of the grey areas between these categories and perhaps 37 00:03:42,580 --> 00:03:47,650 raise a few issues for a few methodological issues for our own historiography. 38 00:03:48,370 --> 00:03:55,419 So if you've been attending the Treasure Series so far, you'll be aware that treasure hunting traditions are a global phenomenon, 39 00:03:55,420 --> 00:03:58,600 but not necessarily a well-known or well understood one. 40 00:04:00,100 --> 00:04:07,420 In many of the stories that I'm going to describe, the protagonists are travelling on active quests for specific objects. 41 00:04:08,080 --> 00:04:13,450 Instead, the discovery of treasure is often haphazard or guided by outside forces. 42 00:04:13,450 --> 00:04:17,470 And I think this is also how scholars come to treasure traditions through. 43 00:04:17,480 --> 00:04:21,370 We don't go looking for them, we kind of fall into them sideways. 44 00:04:22,930 --> 00:04:30,159 My own folklore or origin story for why I'm interested in this topic is that some years ago 45 00:04:30,160 --> 00:04:35,410 I was doing my best to try and document a minority language of the southern Philippines. 46 00:04:35,800 --> 00:04:42,430 And in the process I became very interested in how the speakers of this language historic sites their language, 47 00:04:42,430 --> 00:04:46,330 the stories they told to explain the origins of the language. 48 00:04:46,750 --> 00:04:55,030 And while I was drawing out these stories and eliciting more stories, I came across a subgenre of lost treasure narratives. 49 00:04:56,770 --> 00:04:59,950 And I yeah. 50 00:05:00,250 --> 00:05:06,460 And the more I learnt about, the more I realised that these treasure narratives were part of much wider narrative networks. 51 00:05:07,210 --> 00:05:12,700 Um, so I want to start with a news story that broke a couple of years ago and which I 52 00:05:12,700 --> 00:05:18,400 was invited to comment on by no less a journalistic authority than the Daily Mail. 53 00:05:19,450 --> 00:05:27,250 So I'll let you read that very long, very good little key word headline there. 54 00:05:27,640 --> 00:05:31,130 And if you're wondering where I am, I am. 55 00:05:31,640 --> 00:05:36,190 I'm some expert over there. That's me. I'm representing some experts. 56 00:05:37,960 --> 00:05:42,850 So this piece emerged in response to a this piece was written in response to a video that 57 00:05:43,390 --> 00:05:50,290 was circulated online of Filipino divers apparently uncovering gold bars in a cave. 58 00:05:50,290 --> 00:05:55,810 And these fires were where dramatically rigged up to explosives. 59 00:05:56,110 --> 00:06:00,490 And I will play the video if I can, because it's super short. 60 00:06:11,790 --> 00:06:15,870 The divers are in the case they uncovered called biophysics for each other. 61 00:06:16,530 --> 00:06:25,439 And it goes for about 4 seconds. But if you go online, you'll discover that these kinds of stories are relatively regular. 62 00:06:25,440 --> 00:06:31,950 In the Philippines, people are always purporting to looking for treasure, purporting to find treasure. 63 00:06:32,190 --> 00:06:36,180 But the treasure never seems to materialise in any public way. 64 00:06:36,840 --> 00:06:41,940 And just like in the video that I would have showed you, the locations are always fuzzy. 65 00:06:43,530 --> 00:06:50,729 So I'm occasionally brought in to be the boring old sceptic whose job it is to pour scorn on on these stories. 66 00:06:50,730 --> 00:06:54,060 And I think it's a shame because I don't necessarily find them silly. 67 00:06:54,090 --> 00:07:02,850 I think it's a predictable rediscovery of lost treasure in the Philippines is something fundamentally interesting from a folklorists perspective, 68 00:07:03,600 --> 00:07:08,969 but the persistence of the story can have negative consequences. 69 00:07:08,970 --> 00:07:12,030 And I'll talk briefly about the dark side of treasure hunting, 70 00:07:12,360 --> 00:07:17,940 but I wanted to show you the video because I wanted to argue that these things are kind of modern as well. 71 00:07:17,970 --> 00:07:24,060 This is a sort of digital versions of narrative cycles that have been retold for quite some time. 72 00:07:24,750 --> 00:07:28,680 And I'm going to be arguing that treasure is sought and found or imagined to 73 00:07:28,680 --> 00:07:32,850 be found because it helps to explain the colonial predicament in some way. 74 00:07:32,880 --> 00:07:38,520 Resources are unjustly extracted by foreign powers and then kept in trust by the landscape. 75 00:07:38,820 --> 00:07:41,880 But they can be recovered by the right person with the right motives. 76 00:07:42,180 --> 00:07:47,880 And it's the promise of potential reward and moral redemption that gives lost treasure its persistent appeal. 77 00:07:47,910 --> 00:07:48,870 That's what I want to argue. 78 00:07:49,440 --> 00:07:58,110 So I've done some very minor and opportunistic documentation of Filipino folklore in southeast Bohol, which is this island over here. 79 00:07:59,110 --> 00:08:00,080 And that's the subtext. 80 00:08:01,330 --> 00:08:11,020 But most of what I know I've learnt of folklore has been from documentation produced by others and published in unpublished archives. 81 00:08:12,430 --> 00:08:16,150 So I just want to give you a bit of background about this documentation. 82 00:08:16,420 --> 00:08:21,159 So Filipino folklore became an object of scholarly interest in the late 19th century, 83 00:08:21,160 --> 00:08:25,389 and this is a time of great intellectual ferment in the Philippines. 84 00:08:25,390 --> 00:08:33,370 It's when a middle class could hear it for the first time, an educated middle, middle class, a merchant class. 85 00:08:33,370 --> 00:08:38,350 They went to Spain to be educated. They were referred to as the king of strangers, 86 00:08:38,680 --> 00:08:48,640 and they wrote novels and plays and painted paintings that elevated and glorified native Filipino culture. 87 00:08:49,360 --> 00:08:53,620 And another thing that they did was they began to document folklore. 88 00:08:54,760 --> 00:08:57,590 And I might add some examples of this is. 89 00:08:59,260 --> 00:09:06,790 And this is this folklore, often documented in Spanish or translated into Spanish, has formed part of my informal corpus. 90 00:09:07,150 --> 00:09:13,380 And these documentation efforts that began in the late 19th century kind of continued up until the 1950s. 91 00:09:13,390 --> 00:09:18,610 So just into the past, American hero. So this is the cool period of documenting folklore. 92 00:09:19,060 --> 00:09:25,629 It's hard to squarely define the scope and character of traditional Filipino folklore, but it is actually my dimension. 93 00:09:25,630 --> 00:09:31,340 A largely oral Sonora. It was developed and circulated by a mostly non-military working class. 94 00:09:31,360 --> 00:09:38,020 And the stories themselves really emphasise working class values and aspirations at that time. 95 00:09:38,290 --> 00:09:45,159 And I certainly see it as a post contact genre that's distinct from the very formal epic poetry that's still performed and 96 00:09:45,160 --> 00:09:50,680 transmitted by cultural minorities in the highlands of Luzon and Mindanao in the very north and the south of the country. 97 00:09:52,330 --> 00:09:55,389 And having said that, there's not always a very clear dividing line, 98 00:09:55,390 --> 00:10:00,459 because Filipino folklore occasionally incorporates some of the gods and monsters 99 00:10:00,460 --> 00:10:04,450 and tricksters and lovers and heroes that can mix in the Highland epics, 100 00:10:04,450 --> 00:10:05,770 in the pre contact epics. 101 00:10:06,490 --> 00:10:14,680 But at the same time, it takes on many more of the tropes of European folklore we encounter, for example, Snow White and Cinderella. 102 00:10:14,980 --> 00:10:19,090 And we get stories that hew quite closely to Spanish romantic ballads. 103 00:10:20,020 --> 00:10:23,240 And there's an influence from Malay and Indian narrative. 104 00:10:23,260 --> 00:10:32,440 So it's very hybridised. And I'm afraid I'm not going to be talking about that so much because I don't know about It's So and Wild. 105 00:10:32,440 --> 00:10:39,280 This The Highlands epic poetry is a highly structured and some metered genre, and it can take days to perform. 106 00:10:39,940 --> 00:10:45,250 Folklore has no canonical recitation form. It's much shorter and anyone can erase it. 107 00:10:45,550 --> 00:10:49,960 So I'm defining folklore as a vernacular non-specialist narrative tradition, 108 00:10:50,230 --> 00:11:00,880 and I've collected a very informal corpus of around 4000 pages from published and unpublished sources in Spanish and English and Philippine languages. 109 00:11:01,330 --> 00:11:09,520 So it's important to point out that Filipino folklore is not really circulated, makes it widely as a vernacular storytelling tradition anymore. 110 00:11:10,810 --> 00:11:17,379 But it has found a second home in popular culture. So I'll show you some stills from television advertisements. 111 00:11:17,380 --> 00:11:26,510 This one on the left is showing them the trunk of the old lady with the white hair who was transformed into the young lady with the white eggplants, 112 00:11:26,530 --> 00:11:34,960 which is on the right hand side is stills from, but it's showing the motif of the cross headed demon that you can be transformed into. 113 00:11:35,620 --> 00:11:38,720 And it's also selling you a BlackBerry there. 114 00:11:40,900 --> 00:11:42,580 So. Oh, yeah. 115 00:11:42,660 --> 00:11:53,540 Advertisements for shampoo for some reason often feature folkloric themes, but not for some reason, because dishevelled hair is associated with evil. 116 00:11:53,560 --> 00:11:58,240 So shampoo can solve that problem for you and make you laugh at the same time. 117 00:12:00,550 --> 00:12:07,320 And. Oh yeah. This is stills from a television ad for nail polish featuring the US one. 118 00:12:07,330 --> 00:12:08,680 It's a little bit hard to see here, 119 00:12:09,100 --> 00:12:18,900 but the other one is the terrifying woman who flies through the match and cuts herself in half and goes and turns out to have signs of AIDS then. 120 00:12:18,910 --> 00:12:23,410 And then she goes and joins back in her body. The next morning in this advertisement, 121 00:12:23,680 --> 00:12:30,190 she victim discovered that they're wearing the same brand of nail polish and they bonds up at that major little dance event. 122 00:12:30,700 --> 00:12:37,120 But then the last one is a very kind of common tend to try to be like, oh, if that which yeah, 123 00:12:37,330 --> 00:12:41,800 maybe that would make it easier to say this is probably the hardest slide to see anyway. 124 00:12:46,630 --> 00:12:50,150 Okay. That's all right. Okay. Good. All right. 125 00:12:50,890 --> 00:13:02,560 All right. So there's some just some films featuring folkloric themes, even though the aural narration of folklore is is relatively rare. 126 00:13:02,890 --> 00:13:06,220 It's reinvented itself in these things, other forms. 127 00:13:06,640 --> 00:13:12,070 So there are a range of genres or narrative types within Filipino folklore other than treasure hunting. 128 00:13:13,120 --> 00:13:18,699 There are, for example, creation and origin stories, heroic narratives, fables and animal stories, 129 00:13:18,700 --> 00:13:22,480 stories about magic and its consequences, trickster tales, religious parables. 130 00:13:22,900 --> 00:13:28,840 And I don't want to go into too much depth, but I do just want to mention that treasure hunting is just one theme among many. 131 00:13:29,590 --> 00:13:33,280 So how can we analyse the treasure hunting theme in Filipino folklore? 132 00:13:34,110 --> 00:13:39,190 I want to also point out that to speak of treasure hunting is a little misleading 133 00:13:39,550 --> 00:13:43,540 here because the stories really rarely take the form of a classical quest, 134 00:13:43,540 --> 00:13:49,360 as I mentioned. Rather, the treasure is something that comes under one's control or eludes one's control. 135 00:13:49,370 --> 00:13:56,680 So less of a quest and more of a struggle for control, struggle to claim or maintain authority over the treasure. 136 00:13:56,980 --> 00:14:06,730 That's a running thing. And in this struggle, in my account takes place between supernatural entities, disempowered insiders and powerful outsiders. 137 00:14:07,180 --> 00:14:08,890 This is how I've broken it down. 138 00:14:09,100 --> 00:14:17,110 So supernatural entities very often enchanted landscapes, but also ghosts and windows and encounters, which are forms of little people. 139 00:14:18,640 --> 00:14:28,030 Disempowered. But moral inside is classical work, as farmers, often anti-colonial rebels, which I think is interesting, and innocent children. 140 00:14:28,780 --> 00:14:34,990 And the powerful and immoral outsiders pirates, priests, kings, colonial authorities, dictators, that sort of thing. 141 00:14:35,320 --> 00:14:39,040 And this is very much my own ad hoc taxonomy. 142 00:14:39,700 --> 00:14:44,170 And unfortunately, the documentation of folklore in the Philippines, including by me, 143 00:14:44,590 --> 00:14:50,860 has suffered from a failure to describe image analytic categories that would be natural to the writers and listeners, 144 00:14:50,860 --> 00:14:55,840 and I hope to do better next time, now that I'm a bit more experienced. 145 00:14:56,260 --> 00:15:00,730 But at the very least, these are the three kinds of actors that we encounter again and again. 146 00:15:00,970 --> 00:15:05,530 And a basic structure of the stories is that we start with the disempowered 147 00:15:05,530 --> 00:15:09,220 insiders who are either innocent or at least trying to be virtuous in some way. 148 00:15:09,460 --> 00:15:14,800 And these are the protagonists that we as the listeners, as the audience, 149 00:15:14,800 --> 00:15:20,110 are expected to identify with and were expected to learn from their successes and from their mistakes. 150 00:15:21,790 --> 00:15:28,840 And the protagonists think are appropriate treasure, but access to it is mediated by a supernatural entity. 151 00:15:29,590 --> 00:15:36,730 So something like this is the basic structure, the minimum narrative structure, and can be extended in various ways. 152 00:15:36,760 --> 00:15:43,000 For example, protagonists often have to demonstrate moral integrity in order to get rights to the treasure. 153 00:15:43,240 --> 00:15:49,000 And this could be in the form of demonstrating reciprocity, honesty, fairness. 154 00:15:49,000 --> 00:15:52,630 Loyalty is a big one as well. When it comes to treasure stories. 155 00:15:53,230 --> 00:15:59,020 When a powerful outsider is involved, it becomes a bit more complex and it turns into a three way struggle. 156 00:15:59,110 --> 00:16:04,360 I will be describing some of these stories soon so that you can so that this is not so abstract. 157 00:16:06,700 --> 00:16:16,840 Okay. So sometimes that treasure starts off in the hands of the powerful outsider and it's won by the insider with help from the supernatural entity. 158 00:16:18,190 --> 00:16:23,470 Or the treasure can be appropriated by the supernatural entity and withheld from both human actors. 159 00:16:23,830 --> 00:16:29,560 And supernatural entities are typically the ultimate arbiter of who gets to have the treasure, 160 00:16:31,330 --> 00:16:34,479 but they can be tricked, and they're not always completely good either. 161 00:16:34,480 --> 00:16:41,450 They can sometimes be selfish or vicious. And importantly, whenever treasure does not end up in the hands of the Disempowered Insider, 162 00:16:41,770 --> 00:16:47,739 it's presented as awaiting rediscovery in the future by someone who is suitably virtuous. 163 00:16:47,740 --> 00:16:52,910 And that means. It's going to stay in the landscape until something good comes along. 164 00:16:52,910 --> 00:16:56,240 The bad guys almost never get the treasure. 165 00:16:56,630 --> 00:17:03,140 We'll look at some examples when they do. So I'm going to start by describing a few very simple treasure narratives that involve 166 00:17:03,770 --> 00:17:08,540 only the minimum structure of the disempowered protagonist and the supernatural entity. 167 00:17:08,900 --> 00:17:17,090 So there's a story recorded all over the Philippines about poor people who live near a cave, and the cave is filled with fine plates and tableware. 168 00:17:17,360 --> 00:17:22,759 Whenever there's a wedding, the people go into the cave to borrow the plates, but they must always bring them back. 169 00:17:22,760 --> 00:17:31,550 And invariably someone forgets or they break a plate or the plates come back dirty and the cave mouth closes forever and the treasure disappears. 170 00:17:31,820 --> 00:17:36,080 And sometimes the cave will close with people inside it. Okay. 171 00:17:38,560 --> 00:17:43,990 So here you can really see that I'm fortunate and I know you can. 172 00:17:44,020 --> 00:17:53,680 Okay, so I'll just try to plot where within my little corpus I've found examples of the cave and the plates treasure story. 173 00:17:53,690 --> 00:17:59,170 So this is a story in which an enchanted landscape has control over the treasure. 174 00:17:59,500 --> 00:18:04,480 Poor people who demonstrate virtue can gain access to it and access is withdrawn when the trust is violated. 175 00:18:04,870 --> 00:18:10,660 And there are variations of this story, but only one virtuous person is granted access to wealth, 176 00:18:10,870 --> 00:18:18,370 whether it's in the form of plates or gold or anything else, from an enchanted being or a landscape on the proviso that they keep it a secret, 177 00:18:18,370 --> 00:18:23,229 or that they don't take too much, and they soon become much wealthier than everyone in the village. 178 00:18:23,230 --> 00:18:30,670 And this arouses suspicion. And in a moment of weakness, they reveal the true source of their wealth to a member of their family, 179 00:18:30,670 --> 00:18:33,520 and that causes them to lose everything and become poor again. 180 00:18:35,440 --> 00:18:41,739 So another kind of story is when ordinary people bury treasure and die before passing on its location. 181 00:18:41,740 --> 00:18:47,110 And then the treasure then falls under the control of encounters between these little people. 182 00:18:47,410 --> 00:18:55,780 And it can be rediscovered by means of house ghosts or dreams or disembodied voices or white coloured animals can lead them to the treasure, 183 00:18:55,900 --> 00:18:59,860 which is a colour associated with wealth, power and beauty. 184 00:18:59,860 --> 00:19:02,650 And to some extent it's associated with foreignness as well. 185 00:19:03,820 --> 00:19:10,930 So in other stories, treasure is guarded by monsters or the threat of sudden environmental catastrophes like floods and storms. 186 00:19:11,230 --> 00:19:17,920 And in some of these stories, we get hints of powerful outsiders who might be waiting in the wings to compete for the treasure. 187 00:19:18,550 --> 00:19:23,140 And occasionally the treasure is also characterised as itself being foreign. 188 00:19:23,470 --> 00:19:29,440 So it can be described as goods from China or from America or from somewhere far away. 189 00:19:31,600 --> 00:19:35,460 So I now want to introduce the the powerful outsider into the equation. 190 00:19:35,470 --> 00:19:42,610 Here's a story that was collected by an American schoolteacher in 1908, 191 00:19:42,970 --> 00:19:48,310 and it's set during the Philippine-American War, which had just concluded six years earlier. 192 00:19:49,810 --> 00:19:57,040 So for those unfamiliar with the history, Philippine nationalists declared the independence of the Philippines in 1896, 193 00:19:57,370 --> 00:20:01,239 which kicked off the the Philippine Revolution. 194 00:20:01,240 --> 00:20:07,180 And then this resulted in war with Spain. 195 00:20:07,180 --> 00:20:13,840 The US entered the Philippines and allied itself with the Nationalists because at the time it was fighting the Spanish-American War. 196 00:20:14,200 --> 00:20:22,810 But then having won the war, America decided to keep the Philippines as a colonial possession, which they kept for another 50 years or so. 197 00:20:24,970 --> 00:20:31,120 But when they made that decision, they kicked off the Philippine-American War, which went on for another few years, 198 00:20:32,500 --> 00:20:38,260 between which the Americans called the war of the insurgency, but the Filipinos called them the Philippine-American War. 199 00:20:38,620 --> 00:20:42,970 So according to the narrator, this story is set during that last war. 200 00:20:43,180 --> 00:20:52,299 And it describes a tree in La Laguna that is covered in mysterious inscriptions, in an unrecognised language that grows in front of a waterfall. 201 00:20:52,300 --> 00:21:01,750 This specific waterfall here and behind the waterfall left a wealthy water spirit who was adorned with precious jewels and gold. 202 00:21:02,050 --> 00:21:05,530 And she had a servant and a golden cow and a golden centipede. 203 00:21:05,830 --> 00:21:09,010 And one day a poor peasant girl went to wash her feet in the stream. 204 00:21:09,580 --> 00:21:11,200 When she encountered the water spirit, 205 00:21:11,530 --> 00:21:17,499 the spirit gave her money and golden jewellery with the injunction not to tell anybody where she got it when the girl's mother 206 00:21:17,500 --> 00:21:23,739 eventually compels her to tell the truth and the treasure disappeared after the Americans learned of the treasure in the cave, 207 00:21:23,740 --> 00:21:28,930 they tried to obtain it, but were continually thwarted. And this is how the story ends. 208 00:21:29,230 --> 00:21:35,230 So today, whenever an American or any foreigner goes there, even if it be William H. 209 00:21:35,230 --> 00:21:41,620 Taft, who was then the governor of the Philippines, it rains heavily, although the sun shines brightly. 210 00:21:41,920 --> 00:21:48,190 So this is a neat example, I think, of the treasure being awarded to the virtuous protagonist by a supernatural agent, 211 00:21:48,190 --> 00:21:54,190 withdrawn again because of their failure to maintain loyalty, but then also withheld from powerful interlopers. 212 00:21:54,550 --> 00:22:01,720 And the war doesn't enter into the story at all. But the narrator insists that this is the context for understanding it. 213 00:22:02,290 --> 00:22:08,500 And I think we can think about this story as trying to draw attention to who has rights, to what resources and what terms. 214 00:22:09,340 --> 00:22:13,750 And I want to now recount a story that set much earlier in pre Spanish Manilla. 215 00:22:14,530 --> 00:22:19,870 And I'm abbreviating a great deal and it goes roughly like this in the village that would one day become Manilla, 216 00:22:20,170 --> 00:22:29,320 there was a golden idol of the indigenous guy called Cut Town that people journeyed from miles around to worship one day Muslim pirates. 217 00:22:29,650 --> 00:22:34,990 This is from an illustrated version from the South came to rent the village for slaves. 218 00:22:34,990 --> 00:22:38,050 The people gathered up all their gold, including the statue of Captain. 219 00:22:38,120 --> 00:22:42,740 To offer to the pirates as an appeasement, a message of road to the pirates with the treasure. 220 00:22:43,100 --> 00:22:49,010 But the pirate captain, who wanted only slaves, rejected the offer, casting all the treasure and the messenger into the water. 221 00:22:49,370 --> 00:22:54,290 At that moment, the sky grew black. The messenger was plucked safety by invisible hands. 222 00:22:54,560 --> 00:22:58,760 And a shower of silver fire rained on the pirate fleet, which sank into the harbour. 223 00:22:59,180 --> 00:23:04,640 When the people returned to the temple, they discovered the idol of time was back in its former place, 224 00:23:05,000 --> 00:23:11,030 now adorned with the rest of the lost treasure that had earlier been offered to the attackers and is told that the 225 00:23:11,030 --> 00:23:17,060 silver phosphorous visible in the bay at night is a reminder of Cape Town's silver fire that saved the village. 226 00:23:17,390 --> 00:23:21,020 So this is a story where it's easy to identify all the players, 227 00:23:21,680 --> 00:23:27,889 the disempowered indigenous insiders who are controlling the treasure, the powerful outsiders who dispose of it in the sea, 228 00:23:27,890 --> 00:23:31,760 and the supernatural entity operating through an enchanted landscape who 229 00:23:31,760 --> 00:23:35,540 ultimately saves the villagers and restores the treasure to its rightful owner. 230 00:23:36,530 --> 00:23:41,930 And the story prefigures, I think, what I want I call the last bell cycle that Rob mentioned before. 231 00:23:42,140 --> 00:23:48,170 So the whole I documented a story about a silver bell that belonged to the native people of the island. 232 00:23:48,320 --> 00:23:49,790 It's also described as a white belt. 233 00:23:49,790 --> 00:24:00,110 So that black comes up again into it until the Spanish priest requisitioned it and hoisted it into the bell tower of their own church. 234 00:24:00,530 --> 00:24:07,400 Then, in an act of daring, the bell was reclaimed by the people who sunk it into a river so that the Spanish could never get hold of it again. 235 00:24:08,030 --> 00:24:14,090 And in the variant, it's the 17th century rebel Tom Blunt, who had first been offered the belt by the Spanish as a gift. 236 00:24:14,450 --> 00:24:21,620 But then a priest came to take it back and install it in the church, prompting Tom Bloch to sink it in the river with the aid of an enchanted bird. 237 00:24:22,060 --> 00:24:29,600 And this is where I have recorded Bell's stories, not personally recorded, but that exist in the documentation. 238 00:24:29,610 --> 00:24:31,040 I have recorded them involved. 239 00:24:32,840 --> 00:24:40,220 And there is a picture of it in from a house that I visited in Bohol of the Enchanted Bird, helping to dispose of the bell. 240 00:24:41,300 --> 00:24:45,070 And the story concludes that at dusk, you can sometimes see the silver bird, 241 00:24:45,080 --> 00:24:50,870 a silver bell glinting under the water, and there's a prohibition against trying to raise it again. 242 00:24:50,870 --> 00:24:55,970 If it's raised by someone who's not sufficiently patriotic, then a flood would ensue. 243 00:24:56,360 --> 00:25:02,210 So I later came across versions of this last Bell story from other parts of the Philippines. 244 00:25:03,920 --> 00:25:12,380 So there and the role of powerful outsiders is played either by Spanish priests or Muslim pirates. 245 00:25:12,620 --> 00:25:19,280 And the enchanted landscapes do the job of withholding the bell or directing it into the hands of the rightful owners. 246 00:25:19,550 --> 00:25:27,590 So in the Cove, which is over here, the bell was sunk into a lake to protect it from pirates. 247 00:25:27,860 --> 00:25:33,870 But when the pirates had gone, they tried to get the bell back and it provoked a storm and the bell was being protected by a giant. 248 00:25:35,480 --> 00:25:39,110 And we're also in Mindoro Oriental. 249 00:25:39,110 --> 00:25:42,620 I hear the stories that it was a golden bell and pure gold. 250 00:25:42,620 --> 00:25:46,050 And now the pirates came. They buried it. 251 00:25:47,060 --> 00:25:49,690 When the pirates left, they couldn't remember where they buried the bell. 252 00:25:50,060 --> 00:25:57,020 And then a boy was walking through the forest, sitting and cut of the tree, a copper tree which has bell shaped fruits. 253 00:25:57,020 --> 00:26:00,110 And that signalled the location of the bell. So they're able to get it back again. 254 00:26:02,720 --> 00:26:12,290 Okay. So there's another story that the bell of the Church of San Francisco de Manilla, which is here, 255 00:26:13,520 --> 00:26:19,160 was one day found floating in the bay and all the Spanish religious orders gathered to help bring it to land. 256 00:26:19,550 --> 00:26:22,879 But despite the small size of the bell, it proved too heavy. 257 00:26:22,880 --> 00:26:28,370 And only when the clergy had left the scene with the native Filipinos able to lift it with surprising A's. 258 00:26:29,390 --> 00:26:35,900 And interestingly, this church, along with its bell, I presume, and now lost in the bombing of Manilla in World War Two. 259 00:26:36,680 --> 00:26:40,940 So clearly we can say that these bells operate as kind of tokens of rightful ownership, 260 00:26:40,940 --> 00:26:44,900 but also of religious truth and justice and all of those sorts of things. 261 00:26:45,290 --> 00:26:49,099 But for the people that I interviewed in Bohol, this is not a metaphor. 262 00:26:49,100 --> 00:26:52,400 This is a literal bell sustained system. It's a little bell. 263 00:26:52,640 --> 00:26:57,470 It is somewhere it's going to be discovered by the right person at the right time. 264 00:26:58,220 --> 00:27:02,959 And just by way of illustrating how the story infiltrates lived experience in 265 00:27:02,960 --> 00:27:08,870 the 1930s Boreholes provincial governor who himself had documented folklore, 266 00:27:09,860 --> 00:27:10,880 which is in the corpus. 267 00:27:11,120 --> 00:27:19,160 He went he put together an expedition to go and raise the bell from the river from where it was presumed to lie at the confluence of two rivers. 268 00:27:19,760 --> 00:27:24,110 And in the 1980s, a local engineer went looking for it in a cave. 269 00:27:24,320 --> 00:27:34,190 And I also interviewed this engineer about his experience to conclude about there are more stories that I could tell like this. 270 00:27:34,700 --> 00:27:37,790 But I guess what I want to draw your attention to is the way that the. 271 00:27:38,050 --> 00:27:42,220 Folklore seeps into everyday life and informs historical consciousness. 272 00:27:43,810 --> 00:27:46,750 And in fact, just the other day, I found this new story, 273 00:27:46,750 --> 00:27:56,170 this recent new story about the return of repatriation of bells that were taken as war booty from during the Philippine-American War, 274 00:27:56,170 --> 00:27:58,480 and they've just been returned to the Philippines. 275 00:27:58,720 --> 00:28:06,220 But I've also encountered stories in the period of the war period, just after the Philippine-American War, of people stealing each other's bells. 276 00:28:06,820 --> 00:28:14,220 And there was a count for counting from action movement at the time break away from the Catholic Church just after the revolution. 277 00:28:14,230 --> 00:28:17,890 So there were there was bells were in contention. 278 00:28:20,410 --> 00:28:27,530 So. So there's a strong sense throughout the colonisers are appropriating wealth unfairly. 279 00:28:27,770 --> 00:28:31,580 They come undone and lose it into a landscape and it can be retrieved. 280 00:28:33,230 --> 00:28:41,090 Excuse me. So this brings me to the mother of all treasure cycles in the Philippines, which is the story of Yamashita Gold. 281 00:28:41,900 --> 00:28:52,430 And this story is so well diffused that I think it's fair to say that there's no single person in the Philippines who is untouched by it in some way. 282 00:28:53,210 --> 00:29:00,190 Everyone seems to have an emissary in the story. It's a sprawling, complicated and intertextual narrative with so many little notes, 283 00:29:00,200 --> 00:29:09,410 and I even hesitate to describe it as a Philippine a Filipino tradition, given that a lot of its most recent impetus has come from the United States. 284 00:29:10,670 --> 00:29:15,440 So the birth of the legend was after World War Two. So it's after this primary documentation period. 285 00:29:15,710 --> 00:29:18,890 But we'll see that it has clear antecedents in earlier times. 286 00:29:19,520 --> 00:29:27,230 So the story goes that during World War two, the Japanese Imperial Army appropriated millions in war bullion from the territories they occupied. 287 00:29:27,590 --> 00:29:34,909 And since the Japanese, under the command of General Yamashita, assumed that the Philippines would never be recaptured, 288 00:29:34,910 --> 00:29:39,950 even after the war, they decided to to hide it in the Philippines. 289 00:29:42,260 --> 00:29:49,489 But at the close of the war, allied and Filipino soldiers forced the the Imperial Army to retreat in haste, 290 00:29:49,490 --> 00:29:53,690 leaving actually just gold behind in secret tunnels all over the country. 291 00:29:53,960 --> 00:29:59,030 And these tunnels were constructed either by Japanese soldiers or Filipino slave labour, 292 00:29:59,300 --> 00:30:03,740 and they were closed with dynamite, sealing the workers inside them so the secret wouldn't get out. 293 00:30:04,970 --> 00:30:10,940 The story goes that Yamashita had a Filipino helper who was granted a small share of the wealth in exchange for his loyalty. 294 00:30:11,270 --> 00:30:16,370 He was entrusted with maps that have peculiar symbols on them that required a special codebook to decipher. 295 00:30:17,210 --> 00:30:24,860 And then during the Marcos regime, a poor farmer was planning his fields when he struck a giant golden Buddha, 296 00:30:25,220 --> 00:30:28,340 which signalled the location of one of the treasure deposits. 297 00:30:28,640 --> 00:30:38,030 And when the Marcoses found out about this, they they seized the Buddha, they seized the treasure, and they spirited it out of the country. 298 00:30:39,590 --> 00:30:46,880 Other treasure deposits were explored by the Marcoses under the cover of major public works with the collusion of the Japanese government. 299 00:30:47,480 --> 00:30:55,340 And at this story, at this point in the story becomes a kind of open source choose their own adventure localised to different contexts. 300 00:30:55,340 --> 00:31:04,340 And every every medium sized town in the Philippines has a variant of the Yamashita story that relates to that specific place. 301 00:31:04,640 --> 00:31:11,120 So for example, there's a mountain in Bohol where Japanese soldiers are believed to have buried bars of Yamashita of Gold. 302 00:31:11,540 --> 00:31:19,879 But those who search for them and risk losing their lives. And once a group of American engineers plan to bulldoze the mountain to find the treasure, 303 00:31:19,880 --> 00:31:23,930 but then members of the team, one by one, mysteriously started dying. 304 00:31:24,530 --> 00:31:28,640 And so they called off the search for that, for the project. 305 00:31:30,200 --> 00:31:39,979 And there are more stories like this. And what interests me is that this kind of echoes of what Anna has been talking about with these landscapes, 306 00:31:39,980 --> 00:31:45,290 that where the treasure must not be extracted, at least not by the right person, the wrong person. 307 00:31:46,640 --> 00:31:50,660 And what interests me is that this narrative doesn't begin with the historical Yamashita. 308 00:31:50,660 --> 00:31:56,450 It actually pre-dates World War Two. And it comes up especially in the aftermath of earlier wars and occupations. 309 00:31:56,750 --> 00:32:03,200 So the treasure of the 18th century rebel to go fully looted from Spanish churches is also said to be buried somewhere. 310 00:32:03,200 --> 00:32:08,420 But it can only be found by someone who is prepared to use it to overthrow foreign occupiers. 311 00:32:09,260 --> 00:32:13,220 And similar stories are told about the lost treasure of the 16th century. 312 00:32:13,760 --> 00:32:17,030 Chinese Pirate Liman said to be guarded by a mermaid. 313 00:32:17,720 --> 00:32:26,480 And in a town in Bohol where I lived for a short while, the second wealthiest family in the town was suspected to have got their wealth 314 00:32:26,480 --> 00:32:32,030 because they found a big barrel of silver dollars that were left over from silver. 315 00:32:32,030 --> 00:32:36,070 US dollars left over from the American occupation. Okay. 316 00:32:37,540 --> 00:32:41,319 And that. Yeah. And that accounted for their wealth. The cycle is quite consistent. 317 00:32:41,320 --> 00:32:44,950 Powerful figure amasses the treasure by violent or nefarious means. 318 00:32:44,950 --> 00:32:50,200 It resides in a protective landscape, and it's a risk of being reappropriated by other powerful figures. 319 00:32:51,610 --> 00:32:55,930 And what we see here quite forcefully, I think, is this ambiguous boundary between legend and myth. 320 00:32:56,140 --> 00:33:02,530 Yamashita General Yamashita really did steal gold from the occupied territories, including from the Philippines itself. 321 00:33:03,190 --> 00:33:08,380 Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos really were kleptocrats who stole resources and remove them from the country. 322 00:33:09,910 --> 00:33:15,670 Yet none of the other details of this story coincide with the Orthodox historical record. 323 00:33:16,120 --> 00:33:18,880 Instead, we get intertextual elements from folklore. 324 00:33:19,090 --> 00:33:25,000 And you might have spotted already that the theme of the generals caves filled with wealth that closed again capriciously. 325 00:33:25,390 --> 00:33:29,680 The loyal servant who must keep faith, the supernatural landscapes that decide who is worthy. 326 00:33:30,250 --> 00:33:33,909 And of course, the powerful and greedy antagonists. And in my opinion, 327 00:33:33,910 --> 00:33:43,600 it's these folkloric aspects with their moral dimension that make the story so compelling and so believable to the people who write them. 328 00:33:44,890 --> 00:33:53,650 So the anthropologist excuse me, Alex Butch Kirby, who did fieldwork in a village on the other side of Bohol to where I was working, 329 00:33:54,010 --> 00:34:00,130 writes of the disruptive intrigues between actual or suspected treasure hunters in that village. 330 00:34:00,490 --> 00:34:06,040 So usually those suspected of looking for finding treasure were not ordinary villagers, 331 00:34:06,040 --> 00:34:13,840 but relatively powerful foreign figures such as a Japanese reforestation crew and the local mayor and sports critic himself. 332 00:34:14,230 --> 00:34:22,059 So he writes the theme of outsiders, particularly foreigners looking for treasure under the cover of other purposes. 333 00:34:22,060 --> 00:34:26,560 And it was implied stealing it from the rightful owners was a recurrent in many treasure stories. 334 00:34:26,980 --> 00:34:29,170 Foreigners were seen as having clear advantages, 335 00:34:29,170 --> 00:34:35,650 as the local people lacked the sophisticated equipment like metal detectors seen as necessary for such searches. 336 00:34:37,240 --> 00:34:42,970 And this is the point at which the narrative is so compelling and so reinforcing that it overwhelms reality. 337 00:34:44,650 --> 00:34:49,450 Real and bitter arguments take place between and within families over imaginary treasure, 338 00:34:49,750 --> 00:34:52,930 and important archaeological sites are damaged beyond repair. 339 00:34:53,170 --> 00:34:58,719 So my archaeology colleagues in the Philippines report that every single site that they have 340 00:34:58,720 --> 00:35:04,240 excavated has eventually been looted by people looking specifically for Yamashita Gold. 341 00:35:04,510 --> 00:35:08,770 And this is another aspect of the dark side of the treasure hunting cycle. 342 00:35:09,110 --> 00:35:14,740 I'm fascinated by the fact that the Yamashita tale has now migrated to the U.S., 343 00:35:15,100 --> 00:35:21,190 where it's been elaborated to great length by conspiracy theorists, pop novelists and con artists. 344 00:35:22,060 --> 00:35:28,000 So on the left, there's a kind of a long conspiracy theory manual. 345 00:35:28,600 --> 00:35:38,079 I won't give you all the details. Suffice to say that the authors say in the beginning of this book that they've left clues everywhere and safe. 346 00:35:38,080 --> 00:35:42,490 So if they're bumped off by the CIA, then the story can still remain. 347 00:35:42,670 --> 00:35:50,860 And this is a fictional account. On the right hand side. There is currently a confidence trickster by the name of Jim Stuckey, who resides in Manilla, 348 00:35:51,190 --> 00:35:55,110 and convinces American investors that he can help them find Yamashita treasure. 349 00:35:55,150 --> 00:35:58,900 And this is from a story recently covered in The New Yorker Radio Hour. 350 00:35:59,530 --> 00:36:02,920 And Stuckey claims to have connections to the Marcos clan, 351 00:36:03,220 --> 00:36:11,709 and he's managed to extract millions from gullible investors who believe that the mysterious treasure is guarded by 352 00:36:11,710 --> 00:36:17,410 Highland Indigenous people who will only reveal its whereabouts to those who are worthy of repaying the investment. 353 00:36:17,980 --> 00:36:21,430 So this story is in your hands now. 354 00:36:22,060 --> 00:36:27,310 But I want to conclude now by returning to what I think is a more and more positive side of the tradition. 355 00:36:27,670 --> 00:36:34,780 I'm impressed by the work of Sherman, Aurora and George Foster, who have discussed some time ago. 356 00:36:34,780 --> 00:36:38,230 I have discussed similar treasure narratives from Mexico. 357 00:36:39,010 --> 00:36:42,220 From a functional perspective that I'm as sympathetic to. 358 00:36:42,580 --> 00:36:50,790 So as in the Philippines, many of the Mexican stories are presumed by their narrators to be true accounts and are sometimes associated, 359 00:36:50,810 --> 00:36:56,200 often associated with periods of political unrest, such as the Mexican Revolution, 360 00:36:56,860 --> 00:37:00,280 attempts at locating or retrieving treasure and mostly unsuccessful. 361 00:37:00,550 --> 00:37:05,710 But a few cases can always be found of inexplicably wealthy individuals who are said to have found treasure. 362 00:37:07,450 --> 00:37:14,260 And the Mexican treasure is similarly predestined to be found by a rightful owner with misfortune awaiting undeserving claimants. 363 00:37:14,590 --> 00:37:21,160 So for Foster, these tales serve to maintain the economic worldview of static peasant economies, 364 00:37:21,460 --> 00:37:25,840 since they, quote, can account for wealth that can be accounted for in no other manner. 365 00:37:26,470 --> 00:37:34,860 And developing fosters economic interpretation. Shelly Aurora drew attention to the dimensions of personal morality and autobiographical reflect. 366 00:37:35,370 --> 00:37:43,470 We're in. The failure to obtain treasure helps to mediate the disparity between aspirations and achievement, 367 00:37:43,710 --> 00:37:48,510 between what might have been and what actually is making the failure quite understandable, 368 00:37:48,510 --> 00:37:52,230 tolerable, even acceptable to the narrator as well as to the audience. 369 00:37:52,650 --> 00:37:57,180 So in the Philippines, on the other hand, treasure hunting folklore is much more explicitly, 370 00:37:57,180 --> 00:38:03,420 I think, about the colonial experience, about who has natural rights to what wealth and resources. 371 00:38:03,690 --> 00:38:09,269 And I think we see in these stories the re-enactment of a clash of cultures and economic systems that 372 00:38:09,270 --> 00:38:15,959 comes from the original encounter between Filipinos and the often foreign overlords and colonisers. 373 00:38:15,960 --> 00:38:20,340 And this clash brings about a reorganisation of once egalitarian, 374 00:38:20,350 --> 00:38:25,770 relatively egalitarian social structures into a new, hierarchical but unstable arrangement. 375 00:38:26,040 --> 00:38:31,260 And history has shown that the peasants rarely, if ever, succeed within the New World Order, 376 00:38:31,500 --> 00:38:37,170 just as nobody is seen to become wealthy through hard work and thrift as promised. 377 00:38:38,940 --> 00:38:43,319 But when these downtrodden protagonists enter into an alliance with the landscapes to which they 378 00:38:43,320 --> 00:38:49,470 have an intrinsic connection and belonging that can be offered sudden and spectacular reprieves. 379 00:38:50,010 --> 00:38:56,580 So in in a paper I've analysed, the Belle cycle is not merely an economic just so story, 380 00:38:56,940 --> 00:39:03,180 but as a way of rationalising a perceived cultural deficit in terms of intangible cultural heritage. 381 00:39:03,420 --> 00:39:03,989 And in fact, 382 00:39:03,990 --> 00:39:10,590 the educated illustrators who began this process of documenting traditional folklore in the Philippines really wrestled with the sense that 383 00:39:10,590 --> 00:39:19,710 native Filipino culture was somehow inferior to Spanish culture and that this might explain how the Philippines became subservient to Spain. 384 00:39:21,480 --> 00:39:28,810 And at the same time, the Filipino intelligentsia was convinced that the true glory of the Philippines was yet to be revealed, 385 00:39:28,830 --> 00:39:34,920 that there were past civilisations that had been forgotten or distorted by history or interrupted out 386 00:39:34,920 --> 00:39:39,450 of the true flowering of the Filipino civilisation had been interrupted by the Spanish presence. 387 00:39:40,260 --> 00:39:43,530 And personally, I'm I'm somewhat sympathetic to this view, too. 388 00:39:44,310 --> 00:39:51,450 And I want to end with the sad case of the I hope cave in South Cotabato Mindanao. 389 00:39:54,090 --> 00:40:01,410 And I obtained this named after Haji Imam, the local warlord who has jurisdiction or had jurisdiction over this area. 390 00:40:02,160 --> 00:40:10,140 And in May of 1991, it was said that a Japanese man visited Haji and convinced him that gold bars had been buried in the cave. 391 00:40:10,680 --> 00:40:14,220 The man sold idea of a special codebook of sons for treasure hunting. 392 00:40:15,060 --> 00:40:19,470 And with this information, I decided to explore the cave. 393 00:40:20,610 --> 00:40:24,810 And he discovered many important ancient artefacts, including these ones here, 394 00:40:25,560 --> 00:40:30,209 including pottery, which is decorated with haematite and incised designs. 395 00:40:30,210 --> 00:40:38,250 But I have interpreted things as by his codebook as evidence that the real treasure was nearby. 396 00:40:38,250 --> 00:40:44,130 So we kept going. And what he ended up doing was he bulldozed the entrance of the cave. 397 00:40:44,520 --> 00:40:48,659 This led to the collapse of the cave walls. And in this way, 398 00:40:48,660 --> 00:40:55,800 the cave revoked its generosity and most of its true treasure in the form of pre-Hispanic pottery and human remains that's been lost forever. 399 00:40:56,490 --> 00:41:07,530 And I see this as a tragic instance of missed recognition and a kind of an ironic one, too, as Haji, I hope, enacted the treasure cycle. 400 00:41:07,530 --> 00:41:12,510 He failed morally to recognise value and the treasure was denied to him. 401 00:41:12,540 --> 00:41:16,560 So I think the landscape is still waiting for its rightful adherents. 402 00:41:17,040 --> 00:41:17,460 Thank you.