Hiya

Pronounced HEE-yah. Plainly: the sense of what is proper, and what it costs you to breach it.

The standard English rendering is “shame,” and once that word is in place the rest of the portrait follows. A people governed by shame are a people who can be managed by embarrassment, who avoid confrontation because they cannot bear exposure, and who will not push. That is a description of weakness.

Enriquez argued the word sits closer to propriety and dignity. Read that way, hiya is not a fear of exposure but a standard being enforced, including against yourself. “Walang hiya,” said about an official, is not a psychological diagnosis. It is a community verdict that a standard was broken.

Both readings describe the same behaviour. Only one of them makes the person doing it a coward, and Enriquez’s objection was that the cowardly reading does not fit a historical record full of Filipinos revolting.

Source: Virgilio G. Enriquez, who classified hiya as an accommodative surface value and rejected “shame” as the translation, arguing for propriety and dignity. Carried in Rogelia Pe-Pua and Elizabeth Protacio-Marcelino (2000), “Sikolohiyang Pilipino: A legacy of Virgilio G. Enriquez,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3(1), 49 to 71, free PDF. The community-verdict reading follows F. Landa Jocano’s pamantayan model in Filipino Value System: A Cultural Definition, Punlad Research House, 1997, which is library-only and named as a moat in Lesson 2.2.

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