To people who do that so well.
This is the fourth and final trip to Seminole.
In return, we've had two speakers who took specialists and two who are known to be subject to its apologists.
It's something to say about treasure discovery. The first of those was Charles Stewart,
who gave us a remarkable account of the new anthropology of history that he's
built around his work on treasure discovery in Greece and Bulgaria and elsewhere.
That's been very well received. Then we had Katherine Hardy.
We spoke about the budget setback in Tibet and how they were used to draw Chinese students.
Tibetan Buddhism. Then we had read really closely.
You might know. And she spoke about themes of treasure recovery in across a wide part of the world.
And now I'm delighted to welcome the second drawn to Bitmoji anthropologist Dr.
Pierce Kelly from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena,
where he's part of the Minds and Traditions research group that explores the origins and evolution of graphic codes.
In his research interest mainly focuses on language writing systems and creative agency,
in particular his interest in the varied ways in which speakers invent or manipulate symbolic systems to adapt to change circumstances.
And at the Mint Research Group, he's exploring a number of recent writing systems invented by national non-profit,
small scale societies in West Africa and Asia Pacific, several of which are revealed by visionary methods.
And that is of great interest to Himalayan and Tibetan studies people because we find similar phenomena several times in the Himalayas and Tibet.
And Piers is also curator and founder of the Australian Message Message Sticks database,
which is a repository in progress of all known message states located in museums around the world.
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.
Among many articles, Piers is author of the also not being legible invented writing systems as technologies of resistance
in mainland Southeast Asia and also excavating a hidden bill story from the Philippines.
A revised narrative of cultural, linguistic loss and recuperation.
And it was in reading those articles that we thought we'd better invite you, because this rang so many bells.
No pun intended, with many things that happened in Tibetan Himalayas.
Thanks very much for and thank you all for coming.
On the last day of time at 5:00 when we could be in the pub.
So today I'm going to be talking about a centuries old treasure hunting tradition from the Philippines.
And I'm going to first focus on how the tradition is expressed in folklore.
But I also want to look at how it plays out in everyday life and events.
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.
And folklore is sometimes invoked a distinction between legends which are assumed to be myths,
which are stories that are understood to be fanciful by their narrators and their listeners and legends,
which are at least purported to be based on historical events.
And the audience is invited to believe. I'm going to be exploring some of the grey areas between these categories and perhaps
raise a few issues for a few methodological issues for our own historiography.
So if you've been attending the Treasure Series so far, you'll be aware that treasure hunting traditions are a global phenomenon,
but not necessarily a well-known or well understood one.
In many of the stories that I'm going to describe, the protagonists are travelling on active quests for specific objects.
Instead, the discovery of treasure is often haphazard or guided by outside forces.
And I think this is also how scholars come to treasure traditions through.
We don't go looking for them, we kind of fall into them sideways.
My own folklore or origin story for why I'm interested in this topic is that some years ago
I was doing my best to try and document a minority language of the southern Philippines.
And in the process I became very interested in how the speakers of this language historic sites their language,
the stories they told to explain the origins of the language.
And while I was drawing out these stories and eliciting more stories, I came across a subgenre of lost treasure narratives.
And I yeah.
And the more I learnt about, the more I realised that these treasure narratives were part of much wider narrative networks.
Um, so I want to start with a news story that broke a couple of years ago and which I
was invited to comment on by no less a journalistic authority than the Daily Mail.
So I'll let you read that very long, very good little key word headline there.
And if you're wondering where I am, I am.
I'm some expert over there. That's me. I'm representing some experts.
So this piece emerged in response to a this piece was written in response to a video that
was circulated online of Filipino divers apparently uncovering gold bars in a cave.
And these fires were where dramatically rigged up to explosives.
And I will play the video if I can, because it's super short.
The divers are in the case they uncovered called biophysics for each other.
And it goes for about 4 seconds. But if you go online, you'll discover that these kinds of stories are relatively regular.
In the Philippines, people are always purporting to looking for treasure, purporting to find treasure.
But the treasure never seems to materialise in any public way.
And just like in the video that I would have showed you, the locations are always fuzzy.
So I'm occasionally brought in to be the boring old sceptic whose job it is to pour scorn on on these stories.
And I think it's a shame because I don't necessarily find them silly.
I think it's a predictable rediscovery of lost treasure in the Philippines is something fundamentally interesting from a folklorists perspective,
but the persistence of the story can have negative consequences.
And I'll talk briefly about the dark side of treasure hunting,
but I wanted to show you the video because I wanted to argue that these things are kind of modern as well.
This is a sort of digital versions of narrative cycles that have been retold for quite some time.
And I'm going to be arguing that treasure is sought and found or imagined to
be found because it helps to explain the colonial predicament in some way.
Resources are unjustly extracted by foreign powers and then kept in trust by the landscape.
But they can be recovered by the right person with the right motives.
And it's the promise of potential reward and moral redemption that gives lost treasure its persistent appeal.
That's what I want to argue.
So I've done some very minor and opportunistic documentation of Filipino folklore in southeast Bohol, which is this island over here.
And that's the subtext.
But most of what I know I've learnt of folklore has been from documentation produced by others and published in unpublished archives.
So I just want to give you a bit of background about this documentation.
So Filipino folklore became an object of scholarly interest in the late 19th century,
and this is a time of great intellectual ferment in the Philippines.
It's when a middle class could hear it for the first time, an educated middle, middle class, a merchant class.
They went to Spain to be educated. They were referred to as the king of strangers,
and they wrote novels and plays and painted paintings that elevated and glorified native Filipino culture.
And another thing that they did was they began to document folklore.
And I might add some examples of this is.
And this is this folklore, often documented in Spanish or translated into Spanish, has formed part of my informal corpus.
And these documentation efforts that began in the late 19th century kind of continued up until the 1950s.
So just into the past, American hero. So this is the cool period of documenting folklore.
It's hard to squarely define the scope and character of traditional Filipino folklore, but it is actually my dimension.
A largely oral Sonora. It was developed and circulated by a mostly non-military working class.
And the stories themselves really emphasise working class values and aspirations at that time.
And I certainly see it as a post contact genre that's distinct from the very formal epic poetry that's still performed and
transmitted by cultural minorities in the highlands of Luzon and Mindanao in the very north and the south of the country.
And having said that, there's not always a very clear dividing line,
because Filipino folklore occasionally incorporates some of the gods and monsters
and tricksters and lovers and heroes that can mix in the Highland epics,
in the pre contact epics.
But at the same time, it takes on many more of the tropes of European folklore we encounter, for example, Snow White and Cinderella.
And we get stories that hew quite closely to Spanish romantic ballads.
And there's an influence from Malay and Indian narrative.
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.
This The Highlands epic poetry is a highly structured and some metered genre, and it can take days to perform.
Folklore has no canonical recitation form. It's much shorter and anyone can erase it.
So I'm defining folklore as a vernacular non-specialist narrative tradition,
and I've collected a very informal corpus of around 4000 pages from published and unpublished sources in Spanish and English and Philippine languages.
So it's important to point out that Filipino folklore is not really circulated, makes it widely as a vernacular storytelling tradition anymore.
But it has found a second home in popular culture. So I'll show you some stills from television advertisements.
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,
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.
And it's also selling you a BlackBerry there.
So. Oh, yeah.
Advertisements for shampoo for some reason often feature folkloric themes, but not for some reason, because dishevelled hair is associated with evil.
So shampoo can solve that problem for you and make you laugh at the same time.
And. Oh yeah. This is stills from a television ad for nail polish featuring the US one.
It's a little bit hard to see here,
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.
And then she goes and joins back in her body. The next morning in this advertisement,
she victim discovered that they're wearing the same brand of nail polish and they bonds up at that major little dance event.
But then the last one is a very kind of common tend to try to be like, oh, if that which yeah,
maybe that would make it easier to say this is probably the hardest slide to see anyway.
Okay. That's all right. Okay. Good. All right.
All right. So there's some just some films featuring folkloric themes, even though the aural narration of folklore is is relatively rare.
It's reinvented itself in these things, other forms.
So there are a range of genres or narrative types within Filipino folklore other than treasure hunting.
There are, for example, creation and origin stories, heroic narratives, fables and animal stories,
stories about magic and its consequences, trickster tales, religious parables.
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.
So how can we analyse the treasure hunting theme in Filipino folklore?
I want to also point out that to speak of treasure hunting is a little misleading
here because the stories really rarely take the form of a classical quest,
as I mentioned. Rather, the treasure is something that comes under one's control or eludes one's control.
So less of a quest and more of a struggle for control, struggle to claim or maintain authority over the treasure.
That's a running thing. And in this struggle, in my account takes place between supernatural entities, disempowered insiders and powerful outsiders.
This is how I've broken it down.
So supernatural entities very often enchanted landscapes, but also ghosts and windows and encounters, which are forms of little people.
Disempowered. But moral inside is classical work, as farmers, often anti-colonial rebels, which I think is interesting, and innocent children.
And the powerful and immoral outsiders pirates, priests, kings, colonial authorities, dictators, that sort of thing.
And this is very much my own ad hoc taxonomy.
And unfortunately, the documentation of folklore in the Philippines, including by me,
has suffered from a failure to describe image analytic categories that would be natural to the writers and listeners,
and I hope to do better next time, now that I'm a bit more experienced.
But at the very least, these are the three kinds of actors that we encounter again and again.
And a basic structure of the stories is that we start with the disempowered
insiders who are either innocent or at least trying to be virtuous in some way.
And these are the protagonists that we as the listeners, as the audience,
are expected to identify with and were expected to learn from their successes and from their mistakes.
And the protagonists think are appropriate treasure, but access to it is mediated by a supernatural entity.
So something like this is the basic structure, the minimum narrative structure, and can be extended in various ways.
For example, protagonists often have to demonstrate moral integrity in order to get rights to the treasure.
And this could be in the form of demonstrating reciprocity, honesty, fairness.
Loyalty is a big one as well. When it comes to treasure stories.
When a powerful outsider is involved, it becomes a bit more complex and it turns into a three way struggle.
I will be describing some of these stories soon so that you can so that this is not so abstract.
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.
Or the treasure can be appropriated by the supernatural entity and withheld from both human actors.
And supernatural entities are typically the ultimate arbiter of who gets to have the treasure,
but they can be tricked, and they're not always completely good either.
They can sometimes be selfish or vicious. And importantly, whenever treasure does not end up in the hands of the Disempowered Insider,
it's presented as awaiting rediscovery in the future by someone who is suitably virtuous.
And that means. It's going to stay in the landscape until something good comes along.
The bad guys almost never get the treasure.
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
only the minimum structure of the disempowered protagonist and the supernatural entity.
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.
Whenever there's a wedding, the people go into the cave to borrow the plates, but they must always bring them back.
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.
And sometimes the cave will close with people inside it. Okay.
So here you can really see that I'm fortunate and I know you can.
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.
So this is a story in which an enchanted landscape has control over the treasure.
Poor people who demonstrate virtue can gain access to it and access is withdrawn when the trust is violated.
And there are variations of this story, but only one virtuous person is granted access to wealth,
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,
or that they don't take too much, and they soon become much wealthier than everyone in the village.
And this arouses suspicion. And in a moment of weakness, they reveal the true source of their wealth to a member of their family,
and that causes them to lose everything and become poor again.
So another kind of story is when ordinary people bury treasure and die before passing on its location.
And then the treasure then falls under the control of encounters between these little people.
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,
which is a colour associated with wealth, power and beauty.
And to some extent it's associated with foreignness as well.
So in other stories, treasure is guarded by monsters or the threat of sudden environmental catastrophes like floods and storms.
And in some of these stories, we get hints of powerful outsiders who might be waiting in the wings to compete for the treasure.
And occasionally the treasure is also characterised as itself being foreign.
So it can be described as goods from China or from America or from somewhere far away.
So I now want to introduce the the powerful outsider into the equation.
Here's a story that was collected by an American schoolteacher in 1908,
and it's set during the Philippine-American War, which had just concluded six years earlier.
So for those unfamiliar with the history, Philippine nationalists declared the independence of the Philippines in 1896,
which kicked off the the Philippine Revolution.
And then this resulted in war with Spain.
The US entered the Philippines and allied itself with the Nationalists because at the time it was fighting the Spanish-American War.
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.
But when they made that decision, they kicked off the Philippine-American War, which went on for another few years,
between which the Americans called the war of the insurgency, but the Filipinos called them the Philippine-American War.
So according to the narrator, this story is set during that last war.
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.
This specific waterfall here and behind the waterfall left a wealthy water spirit who was adorned with precious jewels and gold.
And she had a servant and a golden cow and a golden centipede.
And one day a poor peasant girl went to wash her feet in the stream.
When she encountered the water spirit,
the spirit gave her money and golden jewellery with the injunction not to tell anybody where she got it when the girl's mother
eventually compels her to tell the truth and the treasure disappeared after the Americans learned of the treasure in the cave,
they tried to obtain it, but were continually thwarted. And this is how the story ends.
So today, whenever an American or any foreigner goes there, even if it be William H.
Taft, who was then the governor of the Philippines, it rains heavily, although the sun shines brightly.
So this is a neat example, I think, of the treasure being awarded to the virtuous protagonist by a supernatural agent,
withdrawn again because of their failure to maintain loyalty, but then also withheld from powerful interlopers.
And the war doesn't enter into the story at all. But the narrator insists that this is the context for understanding it.
And I think we can think about this story as trying to draw attention to who has rights, to what resources and what terms.
And I want to now recount a story that set much earlier in pre Spanish Manilla.
And I'm abbreviating a great deal and it goes roughly like this in the village that would one day become Manilla,
there was a golden idol of the indigenous guy called Cut Town that people journeyed from miles around to worship one day Muslim pirates.
This is from an illustrated version from the South came to rent the village for slaves.
The people gathered up all their gold, including the statue of Captain.
To offer to the pirates as an appeasement, a message of road to the pirates with the treasure.
But the pirate captain, who wanted only slaves, rejected the offer, casting all the treasure and the messenger into the water.
At that moment, the sky grew black. The messenger was plucked safety by invisible hands.
And a shower of silver fire rained on the pirate fleet, which sank into the harbour.
When the people returned to the temple, they discovered the idol of time was back in its former place,
now adorned with the rest of the lost treasure that had earlier been offered to the attackers and is told that the
silver phosphorous visible in the bay at night is a reminder of Cape Town's silver fire that saved the village.
So this is a story where it's easy to identify all the players,
the disempowered indigenous insiders who are controlling the treasure, the powerful outsiders who dispose of it in the sea,
and the supernatural entity operating through an enchanted landscape who
ultimately saves the villagers and restores the treasure to its rightful owner.
And the story prefigures, I think, what I want I call the last bell cycle that Rob mentioned before.
So the whole I documented a story about a silver bell that belonged to the native people of the island.
It's also described as a white belt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And this is where I have recorded Bell's stories, not personally recorded, but that exist in the documentation.
I have recorded them involved.
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.
And the story concludes that at dusk, you can sometimes see the silver bird,
a silver bell glinting under the water, and there's a prohibition against trying to raise it again.
If it's raised by someone who's not sufficiently patriotic, then a flood would ensue.
So I later came across versions of this last Bell story from other parts of the Philippines.
So there and the role of powerful outsiders is played either by Spanish priests or Muslim pirates.
And the enchanted landscapes do the job of withholding the bell or directing it into the hands of the rightful owners.
So in the Cove, which is over here, the bell was sunk into a lake to protect it from pirates.
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.
And we're also in Mindoro Oriental.
I hear the stories that it was a golden bell and pure gold.
And now the pirates came. They buried it.
When the pirates left, they couldn't remember where they buried the bell.
And then a boy was walking through the forest, sitting and cut of the tree, a copper tree which has bell shaped fruits.
And that signalled the location of the bell. So they're able to get it back again.
Okay. So there's another story that the bell of the Church of San Francisco de Manilla, which is here,
was one day found floating in the bay and all the Spanish religious orders gathered to help bring it to land.
But despite the small size of the bell, it proved too heavy.
And only when the clergy had left the scene with the native Filipinos able to lift it with surprising A's.
And interestingly, this church, along with its bell, I presume, and now lost in the bombing of Manilla in World War Two.
So clearly we can say that these bells operate as kind of tokens of rightful ownership,
but also of religious truth and justice and all of those sorts of things.
But for the people that I interviewed in Bohol, this is not a metaphor.
This is a literal bell sustained system. It's a little bell.
It is somewhere it's going to be discovered by the right person at the right time.
And just by way of illustrating how the story infiltrates lived experience in
the 1930s Boreholes provincial governor who himself had documented folklore,
which is in the corpus.
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.
And in the 1980s, a local engineer went looking for it in a cave.
And I also interviewed this engineer about his experience to conclude about there are more stories that I could tell like this.
But I guess what I want to draw your attention to is the way that the.
Folklore seeps into everyday life and informs historical consciousness.
And in fact, just the other day, I found this new story,
this recent new story about the return of repatriation of bells that were taken as war booty from during the Philippine-American War,
and they've just been returned to the Philippines.
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.
And there was a count for counting from action movement at the time break away from the Catholic Church just after the revolution.
So there were there was bells were in contention.
So. So there's a strong sense throughout the colonisers are appropriating wealth unfairly.
They come undone and lose it into a landscape and it can be retrieved.
Excuse me. So this brings me to the mother of all treasure cycles in the Philippines, which is the story of Yamashita Gold.
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.
Everyone seems to have an emissary in the story. It's a sprawling, complicated and intertextual narrative with so many little notes,
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.
So the birth of the legend was after World War Two. So it's after this primary documentation period.
But we'll see that it has clear antecedents in earlier times.
So the story goes that during World War two, the Japanese Imperial Army appropriated millions in war bullion from the territories they occupied.
And since the Japanese, under the command of General Yamashita, assumed that the Philippines would never be recaptured,
even after the war, they decided to to hide it in the Philippines.
But at the close of the war, allied and Filipino soldiers forced the the Imperial Army to retreat in haste,
leaving actually just gold behind in secret tunnels all over the country.
And these tunnels were constructed either by Japanese soldiers or Filipino slave labour,
and they were closed with dynamite, sealing the workers inside them so the secret wouldn't get out.
The story goes that Yamashita had a Filipino helper who was granted a small share of the wealth in exchange for his loyalty.
He was entrusted with maps that have peculiar symbols on them that required a special codebook to decipher.
And then during the Marcos regime, a poor farmer was planning his fields when he struck a giant golden Buddha,
which signalled the location of one of the treasure deposits.
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.
Other treasure deposits were explored by the Marcoses under the cover of major public works with the collusion of the Japanese government.
And at this story, at this point in the story becomes a kind of open source choose their own adventure localised to different contexts.
And every every medium sized town in the Philippines has a variant of the Yamashita story that relates to that specific place.
So for example, there's a mountain in Bohol where Japanese soldiers are believed to have buried bars of Yamashita of Gold.
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,
but then members of the team, one by one, mysteriously started dying.
And so they called off the search for that, for the project.
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,
that where the treasure must not be extracted, at least not by the right person, the wrong person.
And what interests me is that this narrative doesn't begin with the historical Yamashita.
It actually pre-dates World War Two. And it comes up especially in the aftermath of earlier wars and occupations.
So the treasure of the 18th century rebel to go fully looted from Spanish churches is also said to be buried somewhere.
But it can only be found by someone who is prepared to use it to overthrow foreign occupiers.
And similar stories are told about the lost treasure of the 16th century.
Chinese Pirate Liman said to be guarded by a mermaid.
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
because they found a big barrel of silver dollars that were left over from silver.
US dollars left over from the American occupation. Okay.
And that. Yeah. And that accounted for their wealth. The cycle is quite consistent.
Powerful figure amasses the treasure by violent or nefarious means.
It resides in a protective landscape, and it's a risk of being reappropriated by other powerful figures.
And what we see here quite forcefully, I think, is this ambiguous boundary between legend and myth.
Yamashita General Yamashita really did steal gold from the occupied territories, including from the Philippines itself.
Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos really were kleptocrats who stole resources and remove them from the country.
Yet none of the other details of this story coincide with the Orthodox historical record.
Instead, we get intertextual elements from folklore.
And you might have spotted already that the theme of the generals caves filled with wealth that closed again capriciously.
The loyal servant who must keep faith, the supernatural landscapes that decide who is worthy.
And of course, the powerful and greedy antagonists. And in my opinion,
it's these folkloric aspects with their moral dimension that make the story so compelling and so believable to the people who write them.
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,
writes of the disruptive intrigues between actual or suspected treasure hunters in that village.
So usually those suspected of looking for finding treasure were not ordinary villagers,
but relatively powerful foreign figures such as a Japanese reforestation crew and the local mayor and sports critic himself.
So he writes the theme of outsiders, particularly foreigners looking for treasure under the cover of other purposes.
And it was implied stealing it from the rightful owners was a recurrent in many treasure stories.
Foreigners were seen as having clear advantages,
as the local people lacked the sophisticated equipment like metal detectors seen as necessary for such searches.
And this is the point at which the narrative is so compelling and so reinforcing that it overwhelms reality.
Real and bitter arguments take place between and within families over imaginary treasure,
and important archaeological sites are damaged beyond repair.
So my archaeology colleagues in the Philippines report that every single site that they have
excavated has eventually been looted by people looking specifically for Yamashita Gold.
And this is another aspect of the dark side of the treasure hunting cycle.
I'm fascinated by the fact that the Yamashita tale has now migrated to the U.S.,
where it's been elaborated to great length by conspiracy theorists, pop novelists and con artists.
So on the left, there's a kind of a long conspiracy theory manual.
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.
So if they're bumped off by the CIA, then the story can still remain.
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,
and convinces American investors that he can help them find Yamashita treasure.
And this is from a story recently covered in The New Yorker Radio Hour.
And Stuckey claims to have connections to the Marcos clan,
and he's managed to extract millions from gullible investors who believe that the mysterious treasure is guarded by
Highland Indigenous people who will only reveal its whereabouts to those who are worthy of repaying the investment.
So this story is in your hands now.
But I want to conclude now by returning to what I think is a more and more positive side of the tradition.
I'm impressed by the work of Sherman, Aurora and George Foster, who have discussed some time ago.
I have discussed similar treasure narratives from Mexico.
From a functional perspective that I'm as sympathetic to.
So as in the Philippines, many of the Mexican stories are presumed by their narrators to be true accounts and are sometimes associated,
often associated with periods of political unrest, such as the Mexican Revolution,
attempts at locating or retrieving treasure and mostly unsuccessful.
But a few cases can always be found of inexplicably wealthy individuals who are said to have found treasure.
And the Mexican treasure is similarly predestined to be found by a rightful owner with misfortune awaiting undeserving claimants.
So for Foster, these tales serve to maintain the economic worldview of static peasant economies,
since they, quote, can account for wealth that can be accounted for in no other manner.
And developing fosters economic interpretation. Shelly Aurora drew attention to the dimensions of personal morality and autobiographical reflect.
We're in. The failure to obtain treasure helps to mediate the disparity between aspirations and achievement,
between what might have been and what actually is making the failure quite understandable,
tolerable, even acceptable to the narrator as well as to the audience.
So in the Philippines, on the other hand, treasure hunting folklore is much more explicitly,
I think, about the colonial experience, about who has natural rights to what wealth and resources.
And I think we see in these stories the re-enactment of a clash of cultures and economic systems that
comes from the original encounter between Filipinos and the often foreign overlords and colonisers.
And this clash brings about a reorganisation of once egalitarian,
relatively egalitarian social structures into a new, hierarchical but unstable arrangement.
And history has shown that the peasants rarely, if ever, succeed within the New World Order,
just as nobody is seen to become wealthy through hard work and thrift as promised.
But when these downtrodden protagonists enter into an alliance with the landscapes to which they
have an intrinsic connection and belonging that can be offered sudden and spectacular reprieves.
So in in a paper I've analysed, the Belle cycle is not merely an economic just so story,
but as a way of rationalising a perceived cultural deficit in terms of intangible cultural heritage.
And in fact,
the educated illustrators who began this process of documenting traditional folklore in the Philippines really wrestled with the sense that
native Filipino culture was somehow inferior to Spanish culture and that this might explain how the Philippines became subservient to Spain.
And at the same time, the Filipino intelligentsia was convinced that the true glory of the Philippines was yet to be revealed,
that there were past civilisations that had been forgotten or distorted by history or interrupted out
of the true flowering of the Filipino civilisation had been interrupted by the Spanish presence.
And personally, I'm I'm somewhat sympathetic to this view, too.
And I want to end with the sad case of the I hope cave in South Cotabato Mindanao.
And I obtained this named after Haji Imam, the local warlord who has jurisdiction or had jurisdiction over this area.
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.
The man sold idea of a special codebook of sons for treasure hunting.
And with this information, I decided to explore the cave.
And he discovered many important ancient artefacts, including these ones here,
including pottery, which is decorated with haematite and incised designs.
But I have interpreted things as by his codebook as evidence that the real treasure was nearby.
So we kept going. And what he ended up doing was he bulldozed the entrance of the cave.
This led to the collapse of the cave walls. And in this way,
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.
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.
He failed morally to recognise value and the treasure was denied to him.
So I think the landscape is still waiting for its rightful adherents.
Thank you.