Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

In this talk, I unpack the imaginary of the Bangsamoro, including its temporal dimension, as it pertains to the everyday lives of my Maguindanaon interlocutors in the Cotabato region who are part of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front’s (MILF) struggle for the right to self-determination. I look at how the Moro liberation fronts’ re-narrativization of history and memory-making practices, the current peace process, and my interlocutors’ memories and imaginings of peace, prosperity, and violence relate to each other and constitute this imaginary. I situate my analysis within my interlocutors’ lived experience with decades of violence and marginalization, and the liminality of uncertain peace, characterized as much by punctuations of violence and highs of optimism as by anxieties and shifting expectations, as the MILF and the Philippine government inched closer to a peaceful resolution to the decades-long conflict.

About the speaker:

Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo is a Filipina sociocultural anthropologist who is a teaching and research staff at the Department for Southeast Asian Studies of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She obtained her PhD (summa cum laude) in anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin for her dissertation Being and Becoming: Imagination, Memory, and Violence in the Southern Philippines, which provides ethnographic insights into the lives of Maguindanaon adherents of the MILF in the Cotabato region. Prior to moving to Berlin for her PhD studies, Rosa taught anthropology for several years at the University of the Philippines Diliman and Manila campuses. She has published in journals such as Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illnes, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, and has forthcoming articles in South East Asia Research and Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.