Pamantayan (halaga, asal, diwa)

Pronounced pa-man-TA-yan. Plainly: standard.

F. Landa Jocano rejected the practice of cataloguing Filipino values as items on a list, and argued that the right unit of analysis is the standard a community holds people to. A Filipino value system, in his model, has three linked parts:

• Halaga, the evaluative core. What is held to be worth something.
• Asal, the expressive core. Behaviour, and what the behaviour means in itself.
• Diwa, the spiritual core. The collective sentiment underneath both.

His structural move is the part that carries weight for this course. He distinguished an exogenous or foreign model of the Filipino value system from an indigenous or traditional one, and argued that most of what gets published about Filipino values is the foreign model wearing local vocabulary.

The everyday test: “walang hiya,” said about a public official, is not a psychological diagnosis. It is a community verdict that a standard was broken. That is pamantayan doing its job.

Source: F. Landa Jocano (1997), Filipino Value System: A Cultural Definition, Anthropology of the Filipino People Series Vol. 4, Punlad Research House, Manila, ISBN 9716220049, based on fieldwork conducted between 1988 and 1995. Catalog record at HathiTrust. Paid and library-only, held in Philippine university libraries, and no free full-text substitute was found for this course. The course teaches Jocano’s structural move and the three parts, cites him precisely, and does not quote him beyond what the research base verified. Before any Jocano line is spoken on camera, the book gets read.

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