Kapwa

Pronounced KAP-wah. Plainly: the other person is not a separate unit.

English reaches for “fellow” or “other,” and both of those keep two people apart and then stand them next to each other politely. Enriquez argued that the Filipino word does something different. Kapwa is a shared identity, an inner self held in common, so that the boundary English assumes between self and other is not where a Filipino puts it.

You run it daily without naming it. Somebody walks into the pantry while you are eating and “kain tayo” is out of your mouth before you have decided anything. You are not offering food. You are refusing to eat as a separate person in front of another person.

In this course kapwa is the core value, the thing everything else sits on. That matters in both directions. It is the foundation of what is good in Filipino social life, and when the state does not deliver, it is also the rail that patronage runs on, because a patron is not experienced as a briber. He is experienced as one of us.

Source: Virgilio G. Enriquez, founder of Sikolohiyang Pilipino at the University of the Philippines, who defined kapwa in 1978 as “the unity of the self and others, a recognition of shared identity, an inner self shared with others.” Quoted here from 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, which is where the course holds the definition. Book-length statement in Enriquez (1992), From Colonial to Liberation Psychology, UP Press, free to borrow on the Internet Archive.

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