Conquest of Amity: Affective Politics and Cultures of Friendship in the Spanish Colonization of the Philippines, 1521-1762

Abstract

This dissertation presents a political history of friendship in cross-cultural relations between Philippine natives and Spaniards from the early sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. It examines the ways in which various types of friendship were forged in the contexts of colonial contact, domination, endurance, and resistance—and how they were imbricated with interimperial, colonial, and local politics in the Philippines. It conceptualizes these ties as “affective arrangements” and “agonistic intimacies” in order to mark their affective and contractual character as well as their inherent tension. Drawing upon archival and published sources in European and Philippine languages, I argue that the Spanish colonial matrix of power in the Philippines was crucially constituted and challenged through friendship as a site and means of struggle for both sides of the colonial axis as well as third parties. Their politics of friendship transpired on three interconnected levels: interpersonal friendship between individuals or groups of people in direct contact, interpolity friendship between political communities, and divine friendship between God and native converts. All three modes unfolded through the dynamic workings of various affects and entailed analogous practices of friend-making—particularly friendly hailing, gift giving, and covenant making. The Spanish colonization of the Philippines was partly driven by a transimperial paradigm of friendship understood as a set of contractual and affective practices. Rooted in European philosophical and juridical-political traditions, the paradigm informed imperial competition in Southeast Asia and beyond. Spain’s imperial ideology of friendly pacification, however, was compromised by the ethno-racialization of native (in)amicability and practical circumstances on the ground. Its implementation was significantly characterized by violence, for friendship was at times acquired by force just as violence was justified on account of friendship or a lack thereof. Spaniards also appropriated an indigenous Philippine form of ritualized friendship as a native token of friendly agreement, and yet supplanted it with their own legal and ceremonial practices. Nevertheless, Spanish intervention and domination were strategically evaded, negotiated, or resisted by some Philippine natives through their individual maneuvering or their collective mobilization of friendship as a counter-hegemonic mode of social belonging and solidarity. Others, meanwhile, actively befriended vying imperial powers, sometimes oscillating between them, to maintain their relative autonomy and attract foreign aid in their local conflicts. This early colonial politics of amity heralded the leitmotif of friendship that has recurred in Philippine domestic and foreign affairs up to this day.