Sacred Katuiran: Decolonial Sensibility in the Katipunan Papers: An ‘indigenist hermeneutic’ of nineteenth-century Tagalog revolutionary texts

Abstract

Indigenous meanings and renderings tend to be forgotten and buried, and even erased, by non-indigenist interpretations and translations. This is a case study of an ‘indigenist hermeneutic’ approach to a re-translation of the “Kartilya” and other selected texts authored by members of the Katipunan, a nineteenth-century revolutionary movement against Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. The Tagalog word 'katuiran', which is often translated to ‘reason’, in support of a prevailing narrative in Philippine historiography that credits the European Enlightenment for primary Katipunan ideas, becomes central to the research as intertextual analyses unearth a variety of its forgotten meanings and usages, and concomitant mistranslations. A comparative conceptual analysis of 'katuiran' and the Māori word 'tikanga' opens up a viable hypothesis for an expanded indigenous meaning of 'katuiran', that necessitates the re-translation of many passages and other principle ideas of the Katipunan. This re-translation results in a re-narration that depicts an indigenous nineteenth-century ‘decolonial’ Tagalog movement that sought to delink from European constructs epistemically, ethically and politically; and thus, a re-narration that offers a challenge to a ‘European Enlightenment narrative’ for the Katipunan revolution.