Description
The celebration of Christmas in the Philippines, with its accompanying rituals and music, is widely regarded as as one of the longest and most festive traditions in the world. As a transcultural product of Spanish colonial engagement, the traditions and music of Philippine Christmas embody a complex interplay of cultural flows that trace their origins from the Mediterranean to the Far East. These traditions, marked by ambiguities and incongruities, reflect the broader processes of transculturation - where cultural elements are appropriated, adapted, and reimagined across geographies and histories. In the Philippines, a predominantly Christian nation in Asia, the intermingling of indigenous and Hispanic cultures has created a unique cultural praxis, but one that also raises questions about cultural identity, appropriation, and hybridity
This paper seeks to investigate the multifaceted realities of cultural transformation in the context of Hispanic colonialism, focusing on the appropriation and adaptation of the misa de aguinaldo ritual and the villancico musical genre within Filipino cultural practice. I will attempt to trace the process of how an appropriated ritual tradition from the Mediterranean (where the villancico originated as a Spanish musical form) becomes an crucial defining factor in the postcolonial identity of a nation in the Far East (where it was recontextualized in the Philippines). Despite the ambivalences inherent in their colonial origins, these rituals and musical forms have been reimagined and integrated into the fabric of Philippine society, serving as a means of maintaining socio-cultural equilibrium and continuity.
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