Introduction

The notion and practice of claustration of women existed in precolonial societies in the Philippines. Binukot was the term shared by different ethnolinguistic groups in the Visayas and Luzon; liyamin was used among the Maranaos of Mindanao. The Spaniards introduced the corresponding notion and practice of recogimiento. While the notion and practice of long-term female seclusion was common to Hispanic Catholic society and Philippine (indigenous) society, the constituent practices, purposes, and conditions of seclusion differed between the two societies. This study attempts to establish points of conceptual and institutional connection between the binukot and recogimiento and to trace processes of colonial adaptation.

The main theoretical question revolves around the interpretation and translation of concepts. To what extent were lexical correspondences between binukot and recogimiento (and words associated with them) indicative of the adaptation of Hispanic, Catholic cultural and religious norms and values in the practice of seclusion? This question suggests the intersection of conceptual history and social and cultural history. Furthermore, it points to the problem of translatability of a concept formed by experiences and practices in one culture to a concept in another language and likewise shaped in another sociocultural context. Nonetheless, M. Pernau and D. Sachsenmaier, writing about global conceptual history, avoid theoretical paralysis (due to the theoretical impossibility of exact translations) and refer to “a long history of mutual interpretation” that allowed effective communication. Another consideration is the capacity of concepts, expressed in specific terminology, to shape meaning and to be reshaped. The case under study, which cannot claim to “mutual interpretation” but is unidirectional, posits that such interpretation yielded new meanings and values underlying seclusion while the basic indigenous notion and core value of seclusion endured through time.

The methodological limitations of the study arise largely from the paucity and differing nature of the sources for pre-Hispanic and early colonial contexts, mostly epics and lexicons, respectively. With regard to non-Western societies, Barbara Andaya has questioned the “Western tendency to separate ‘literature’ from ‘history’ and discusses how oral literature serves as a vehicle of cultural codes.