Accommodative and confrontative surface values

Enriquez split the surface values in two.

The accommodative set, which he also called colonial: hiya, utang na loob, pakikisama. These are the values that helped Filipinos survive being governed by somebody else. They are the ones every visiting researcher noticed, because accommodation is what a stranger is met with.

The confrontative set: bahala na, lakas ng loob, pakikibaka. Determination in the face of uncertainty, guts, struggle. These come out when a Filipino decides to fight, which is not something a visitor gets shown in the first year.

The asymmetry is the argument. A portrait built from the first set alone describes a people who always yield, and it is a claim about what the researcher had access to rather than about the people. Put the second set back and the same behaviour sits inside a fuller range, without a single observation being withdrawn.

Note the honest limit: these are Enriquez’s categories, argued from indigenous research practice, not a measured distribution. Nobody has counted how often each set appears.

Source: Virgilio G. Enriquez, who designated hiya, utang na loob and pakikisama as colonial or accommodative surface values, and bahala na, lakas ng loob and pakikibaka as confrontative surface values, with kapwa as the core. Set out in Enriquez (1992), From Colonial to Liberation Psychology, UP Press, free to borrow, and carried in Rogelia Pe-Pua and Elizabeth Protacio-Marcelino (2000), Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3(1), 49 to 71, free PDF.

First used in: 2.1 · There is no line where you end and they begin