During his lifetime, Rafael Palma (1874–1939), the fourth president of the University of the Philippines and the author of the Historia de Filipinas, arguably represented the highest aspiration of Filipino intellectuals, something clearly expressed in the metaphor: “National culture is like a river, the more tributaries it has, the richer it is.” Nowadays, his words seem like a vanishing ideal. As a result of intense postcolonial anti-colonialism, there remains a tendency to conceive of “national culture” in essentialist, ethnic, and teleological terms rather than plural, cultural, and processual ones. This tendency is not only a reaction to what one might term the Eurocentric excesses of earlier works on the period but it is also a result of the exigencies of postcolonial nation-building. The Filipino historian and anthropologist Zeus Salazar represents this view as follows:

Before the coming of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, there was no shared pantayong pananaw between the ethno-linguistic groups of the Philippine archipelago despite their close racial and cultural (kalinangan) kinship. There was no Filipino nation that encompassed varied cultures and societies. The Filipino nation was constructed only in the second half of the nineteenth century. It came as a result of the efforts of the Christianized elite who had been exposed to Western culture through Spanish language and through their entry, even if partially, to the Hispanic and Western worlds.

It was the Filipino writer and journalist Nick Joaquín who asked his compatriots the uncomfortable question: “How can we say we are being nationalist when we advocate a return to our pre-1521 identity when that was a clan identity, a tribal identity.”6 But if Philippine national culture was a product of the nineteenth century, what can we make of its variegated “early modern history?”7 Or, to use Palma's metaphor again, what to make of a “national” culture that was in reality a confluence of multiple currents?