Spectacle

On this day every year, all routines at the City of Manila are suspended. It is the Feast of the Black Nazarene, patron of the Quiapo district.

As you read this, a slow and crowded procession will be winding its way through the heart of the city. This procession, a few years back, went on and on for 22 hours, the revered image returning to its home in the wee hours.

This year, the projection is the procession will last for 18 hours. That might be a bit optimistic. With a longer route (to avoid a shaky bridge) and with more people participating, this procession could break the previous record. It will be a true test of endurance --- and of faith.

I have been invited to participate in this events several times in the past, with friends having devotee shirts made for me, embroidered with my name. Each time I chickened out at the last moment. They have given up getting me to walk through Manila barefoot for a day.

Trained a social scientist, I do not relish being swallowed by a frenzied and boundless crowd. By instinct and by training, I tend to push away from social phenomena, the better to observe them from a skeptical distance. When I once entertained the thought participating in this procession, it was principally to observe it as a social scientist.

I did get caught up in a frenzied crowd once, decades back. This was during the wake for ‘Ben Tumbling,’ a local hood in Malabon shot dead by the police.

The poor of my hometown adored ‘Ben Tumbling.’ He stole from the rich and distributed the fruits of his crime to the needy. He earned his nickname by exceptional acrobatics he used to evade the authorities.

When he was killed, the man was elevated to the status of a saint. I went to his wake to observe spell he had cast on his neighbors. Thousands packed the narrow streets around his home, wanting to press nearer the remains of the esteemed rouge. Stepping into the midst of the crowd, I found myself carried to whatever direction the horde moved. It was a mob possessed by a strange spirituality.

I wrote an essay after that, situating ‘Ben Tumbling’ in the context of a primitive rebellion infected by the imagery of a powerful faith. He was worshipped because he represented something in the folk culture and touched a powerful vein among people who equated the standing authority with the injustice that tormented their lives. The poorer they were, the stronger the compulsion to hold up this small-time hood as an icon of liberation.

That essay did not amuse the guardians of dictatorship during that time. Glorifying the short life of a hood was held to be an act of subverting the status quo.

It is never easy to explain the phenomenon of enthralled crowds. The peril of oversimplification is always great.

Devotees attribute many miraculous acts to the Black Nazarene. Notwithstanding it is only an inanimate figurine, so much power is attributed to this particular object.

People believe the potency of this image is especially enhanced during its feast. This is why tens of thousands press towards the image during the procession, wiping cloth on the image, imagining miraculous powers will rub off to cure the desperately sick or uplift the desperately poor.

This is folk Catholicism at its most expressive. I am not sure if the growing cult of devotees to the Black Nazarene conforms to mainstream theology. At any rate, the priests do nothing to discourage what could be heresy: this procession of faith at its most fanatical is allowed to happen every year.

There is a standard social science hypothesis for phenomena such as this one. It is a hypothesis, of course, that does not look kindly upon the devotion expressed in the streets.

The hypothesis proposes that the more powers are attributed to an inanimate object the less those who make the attribution assess their own competence. Therefore, the more powerful an image is imagined to be, the lower the self-esteem of the devotees.

If this hypothesis is valid, what does it tell us about the growing numbers of devotees flocking to this particular procession each year? Does it mean that, in the face of perverse modernization that mass-produces poverty, there is a growing sense of personal impotence?

One always risks the backlash of bigots trying to construct an irreligious explanation for a spectacle of extreme religiosity. I risk my neck just mentioning the standard social scientific hypothesis for the expressive trance of large crowds.

In the town of Pamplona in Spain, one each year the people perform an outrageous ritual. They run through the streets just steps ahead of a herd of angry bulls, risking life and limb.

This ritual is completely insane. The authorities there, however, found great tourism potential in the event. Instead of suppressing the rite in the name of public safety, they perpetuated it for profit. Now even tourists are free to be gored.

The Quiapo procession is now also seen as having great tourism potential, no matter how unhealthy this religious marathon tends to be. True, this is a compellingly visual (and visceral) show of devotion. People have died performing this test of endurance and many injured by all the shoving and all the walking unshod.

In the future, do we want battalions of tourists reinforcing the growing horde of local devotees? It will not convey a flattering impression of the efficacy of our popular culture.