Explorations of the links among place, society, and culture in some recent Anthropocene scholarship have considered islands as important sites and models of investigation. There is a growing interest in the unique relationalities materializing in and between islands—as both geographic category and symbolic concept.
For the 14th talk of the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2023 and sponsored by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society, Mars Briones examines these unique relationalities through narratives of the origin of the Santo Niño de Tacloban image, namely, those concerning a balyuan or exchange of Santo Niño images between Basey and Tacloban and those attributing the image’s beginnings to a piece of wood adrift at sea. Entitled Between Islands, through Storied Sea: Tidalectics in Narratives of the Santo Niño de Tacloban’s Origin, the talk happens on Tuesday, 24th of October 2023 at 5:30PM PST +8:00 | 11:30AM CET +2:00.
Mobilizing the Visayan concept of kaagi (history) vis-à-vis the concept of tidalectics in rendering and analyzing the stories, Briones seeks to dilute ideas that imagine islandness as a state of isolation, thereby foregrounding island-island relationalities and speculating on the nuanced terms of these relations. At the same time, it brings oceanic imagination to the fore by pointing out how the stories relate the Santo Niño’s origin and potency to the sea, thereby recognizing marine space as an active, storied sphere in the archipelagic assemblage. What this instantiates is a move from a terracentric discourse to one that speaks to maritime histories and cultures. Attempting to loosen the land-sea binary, Briones intimates that the stories may offer ways to think in terms of littoral liminality instead of boundary, and interisland/transmarine relationality instead of insular integrity. From these themes, he then suggests possible trajectories towards an island studies in and of Eastern Visayas.
Mars Edwenson Briones is a doctoral researcher at the Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) research hub of the University of Cologne, Germany. His current research draws upon the environmental humanities, disaster anthropology, and island studies to examine how creative and discursive expressions of place and its hazards articulate broader ideas about nature-society entanglements and how these can contribute to decolonizing disaster studies. In 2013, he earned his bachelor’s degree in communication arts from the University of the Philippines (UP) Tacloban College, where he then served as a faculty member of the Division of Humanities until 2022. In 2020, he obtained his master’s degree in art history from UP Diliman, where he wrote his thesis on the geopoetics of the Santo Niño de Tacloban image and devotion.
To participate in the lecture, click this link to register. Or copy and paste this link to your browser: https://bitly.ws/XEcM
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Geography 245 (Island and Archipelagic Geographies) class, the Geographies of Media (GEM) and Human Geography (HuG) research clusters of the UP Department of Geography.
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