ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From words to worlds: a history of Tagalog ichthyology, 1613-1794

• In Event: Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 3

English Abstract

Fish amaze in and out of the archive. They amaze, and abound, in the most miraculous and material ways in Luzon life. Along the shores of Laguna de Bay, for example, the people of Taytay annually honor their patroness, Santa Ana, because it is believed that she swelled the Taguig river with banak (Mugil spp.) in the sixteenth century, saving the community from certain famine. It was from these same shores that Fray Pedro de San Buenaventura (d. 1627) lived and labored among a society of Tagalog barangays (villages) at the turn of the seventeenth century. After nearly two decades of cultural immersion and linguistic intimacy, he published Vocabulario de Lengua Tagala in 1613. Printed by the Tagalog typesetters Tomas Pinpin and Domingo Loag in Pila, Laguna, San Buenaventura’s Vocabulario de Lengua Tagala survives today as the earliest known Tagalog dictionary. More importantly, San Buenaventura’s dictionary abounds with fish: from fish species (banac = banak) and fish dishes (sigang-an = sinigang) to fish habitats (Laguna de Bay) and fish spirits (amansinaya = fishers’ deity). By thinking with San Buenaventura’s dictionary and other Tagalog dictionaries held at the John Carter Brown Library, this paper reveals how local knowledge practices not only named and nuanced Luzon’s fish (worlds), but also, and in doing so, seeded a more-than-human archive for writing a history of Tagalog ichthyology in the age of colonial print.

Author

• Anthony D. Medrano, Brown University