Sikolohiyang Pilipino

Pronounced see-ko-lo-HEE-yang pee-lee-PEE-no. Plainly: Filipino psychology, as a named school rather than as a topic.

Founded by Virgilio G. Enriquez at the University of the Philippines. Its starting position is methodological before it is patriotic: if you study a people in a borrowed language, using instruments built for somebody else, you will find what the instruments were built to find. So the movement built research methods out of ordinary Filipino social practice, and worked from Filipino words rather than from English translations of them.

The results are what this level teaches. Kapwa as the core value. Pakikiramdam as the skill that operates it. The accommodative and confrontative surface values. The eight levels of interaction.

It is not a claim that outsiders may not study Filipinos. Frank Lynch, the researcher Enriquez argued hardest against, was a careful scholar working from what he could see. The claim is about which layer a stranger gets shown.

Source: Virgilio G. Enriquez (1992), From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: The Philippine Experience, University of the Philippines Press, free to borrow on the Internet Archive. The standard short account of the movement, its history and its methods is 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.

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