Ibang-tao

Pronounced ee-BANG TA-oh. Literally: other person.

The first sorting Filipino social life performs on anybody who arrives. It is not hostility and it is not coldness. Ibang-tao is where everyone starts, including people you like, and it comes with its own correct behaviour: civility, care, and the rules applied as written.

That last part is the one with consequences. In a Philippine institution, rules are what ibang-tao gets, and being processed by the rulebook is not a punishment. It is the respectful default for someone you are not in it with.

Five of Enriquez’s eight levels of interaction sit inside this category, running from pakikitungo, plain civility, up to pakikisama, adjusting. The famous Filipino agreeableness is the last stop before the border, and it is still on the outside.

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, where the two categories and the eight levels between them are set out. 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