Hindi ibang-tao

Pronounced hin-DEE ee-BANG TA-oh. Literally: not an other person.

The inside category. Once you are in it, the rules stop being the primary instrument and the relationship takes over. Favours are not a corruption of the correct treatment here, they are the correct treatment, because a person who is one of us is not a case to be processed.

Three of Enriquez’s eight levels sit inside it: pakikipagpalagayang-loob, mutual trust, pakikisangkot, getting involved, and pakikiisa, oneness.

The crossing is felt rather than announced. The moment a producer stops calling you “sir” and starts calling you “pare” is a category change, and everything you are allowed to ask for changes with it.

For this course, this is the single best predictive tool for Philippine institutional behaviour. To guess how an office will handle a request, do not read the rules. Ask which category the person deciding has already filed the applicant under.

Source: Virgilio G. Enriquez, in From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: The Philippine Experience, University of the Philippines Press, 1992, free to borrow on the Internet Archive. Summarised in Rogelia Pe-Pua and Elizabeth Protacio-Marcelino (2000), Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3(1), 49 to 71, free PDF.

First used in: 2.2 · One of us, or not one of us