Edward Said’s Orientalism was a book I first read in the fall of 2001. I recall not being too impressed and finding simple historical errors in it. But mostly it bore me. I am now rereading it because in 2018 the book is far more relevant to our current American culture, if not the world in a real sense. That’s because Orientalism is one of the most influential and seminal works in the field of postcolonialism (and to be frank, it seems more comprehensible than the stuff written by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak).

At some point, I may put down into a post my thoughts on Orientalism. But long-time readers are familiar with my position that postcolonialists, and most progressive Westerners, overemphasize the importance of the colonial in most non-Western societies. But this is not the same as saying the colonial is not important, and, that the colonial does not affect different societies in varied ways.

The Philippines is the mostly large majority Christian country in Asia. It is predominantly Roman Catholic, though like many Catholic nations it’s religiosity is declining. The brutal and blunt current president of the country has had some harsh things to say about the Church.

I bring up the Philippines because in comparison to other Southeast Asia nations it seems clear that it is a creature of colonialism. A hybrid of Western and Asian values that is somewhat out of place. The French influence Vietnam is undeniable, but fundamentally Vietnam remains part of the broader Sinic cultural sphere, as it was before the rise of Europe. This is not so with the Philippines, which was in the early stages of Islamicization when the Spaniards arrived and had only been lightly impacted by Indic civilization in comparison to Java or the Austronesian kingdom of the Chams in mainland Vietnam.

One of the most striking things to me is that more than half of the babies in the Philippines are now born out of wedlock. This is an exception within Asia and even Southeast Asia.

There is one set group of nations which has long had high rates of out of wedlock births: those of Latin America. My reading of the ethnography indicated that this is partly a function of the fact that Iberian males entered into de facto polygynous family relationships early on during the conquest of the New World. And, unlike some other European nations, “natural children” did have some customary rights in Spanish law. Hernan Cortes had two sons with the name Martin. One of them was a mestizo, the product of a relationship with an indigenous woman of New World. The other was the legitimate offspring with Cortes’ aristocratic Spanish wife.

Though Martin Cortes, known as “El Mestizo,” did not have the rights of his brother, he was still provided for. He fought in Central Europe for the Habsburgs, and married and had children.

This pattern of giving some rights and consideration to illegitimate children has been argued as a major reason for the high rates of out of wedlock birth in much of Latin America today. But, the problem with this model is that the number of Spaniards in the islands of the Phillippines was always far lower than in the New World. Demographically they made a marginal impact, and in fact, the Chinese were more numerous.

But it remains the case that Spanish colonial regimes in environs as distinct as the Philippines and the New World left a legacy of high rates out of wedlock births. It could be coincidental, but I doubt that. Scholars genuinely interested in the impact of exogenous colonial shocks should be exploring these cross-cultural patterns theoretically and empirically, not engaging in abstruse linguistic analysis or deploying Theory toward the ends of particular politics.