Pakikisama

Pronounced pa-kee-kee-SA-ma. Plainly: adjusting to the group.

Frank Lynch defined it in 1962 as maintaining smooth relations by going along with the majority, and that definition became the standard one in English. Rendered as “conformity,” it makes a Filipino employee look like someone with no independent position.

Enriquez kept the observation and moved it. Pakikisama is an accommodative surface value, and in his eight levels of interaction it is the last and deepest level still inside the outsider category, which is worth noticing: it is what you do with people who are not yet one of us.

The everyday case is the crew member who says yes to an impossible deadline. Read as conformity, that is a weak employee. Read through kapwa, he is protecting a relationship he expects to still be inside next year, in an industry with no contracts and no enforcement, where the relationship is the only security that exists.

Source: Frank Lynch, S.J. (1962), “Social Acceptance,” in Four Readings on Philippine Values, IPC Papers No. 2, Ateneo de Manila University Press, free PDF, for the standard definition. Virgilio G. Enriquez for the reclassification as an accommodative surface value and as level five of the eight levels of interaction, in Enriquez (1992), From Colonial to Liberation Psychology, UP Press, free to borrow, and Pe-Pua and 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