What is your insight about the Filipino culture based on your experience?

 

Bisaya

Barok and Takya Blog | Bisaya Podcast

My experience is that Filipinos are highly family-oriented, sacrificing their desires for the needs of others. They are great at celebrating life. They love life! And living in the Philippines would make anyone look forward to each day at work because you meet many wonderful friends there--people who are always ready to share a laugh or a good meal with you. The country has natural beauty. I found it interesting how Filipinos will go out of their way to give foreigners directions when asked, even if they may not have understood what was being said most times. Filipinos also think that visitors need no time whatsoever to feel welcome here - which I believe may be an inherent characteristic foreign nationals cannot leave the country without.

The Filipino culture[1] has taught me to live my life fully, enjoy it as much as possible, and make the most of each day. To always be grateful for whatever comes my way because whatever I am going through now will eventually pass. And no matter how many challenges come to my path in life, if I remain steadfast and focused, I will undoubtedly enjoy a happy and peaceful life.

Footnotes

[1] 8 Best Filipino Pastimes of All Time

What can one do to help enrich, contribute, and improve the Philippines and the Filipino culture?

By Holly Benedicto

Bisaya. Has travelled all over the Philippines, some Asian countries and the United States. Scientific background. Has worked extensively with Americans.

Don’t leave it and migrate to other countries. You can work abroad but don’t get a foreign citizenship. Brain drain is a HUGE problem here.

Buy Philippine-made products/support local. Market them on social media and in any international event.

Exercise your right to vote. When you allow the under-educated/uneducated masses whose votes were bought by a pack of groceries to vote but you as a well-educated and disenfranchised individual refuse to vote, you doom the country.

Speak up about cultural issues and problems. The reason why so many issues persist is because many choose to silent in the interest of “pakikisama”. Filipinos are conflict avoidant and pacifist. Have some self-respect. Fight for the future you want and deserve.

What Filipino culture and values are now slowly fading?

 

By: Samuel Astacaan Escabarte

 What should be done to reserve this?

Unfortunately, there are Filipino culture that are no longer practiced or have lost their significance particularly among the new generation of Filipinos.

Below are just some of them:

Pagmamano or kissing the hands and forehead of the elders: parents and grandparents parents. Only few young Filipinos observed and practiced this particular tradition or values

Paninilbihan or servitude

This is one of the courtship customs that should not have been faded. This is particular tradition that Filipinos should be proud of. But unfortunately and for still unknown reasons, this tradition is seldom practice by the new generation of Filipino suitors.

These are just some of the long-established traditions/values that are slowly fading.

How to preserve these traditions/values?

To preserve these traditions, there must be collective efforts among the Filipinos like intensified awareness campaign of these traditions to be initiated by the government.

Another way of preserving these traditions is by teaching and practicing during school and community activities.

For more about Philippine Culture, you may visit my Facebook Page: Philippine Society and Culture.

How does music affect the culture of the Filipinos?

Bisaya

Barok and Takya Blog | Bisaya Podcast

Music as a whole can be used as an encouraging or depressing way to look at life. In this sense, it plays a big role in shaping the culture and values of people and the rest of the world. We see this through kundiman - it carries sentiments and emotions that evoke memories and images for Filipinos. These may clash with the outside world, but this clash gives us identity: these cultural imprints are then integrated back into society to create our metamorphosis into another era. So it's not just about tradition; it's also about forging new ground for generations to come.

This ever-evolving system creates such wonderful flavours that we're able to adapt ourselves better than ever before--we learn new things and explore different ways to make the best out of them. Music is one way we express ourselves, and through this method, we show our appreciation for humility and hard work, two values that shape our bustling nation into a happy place worth living in.

So what does music really mean to Filipinos? It simply tells us where we've been and where we could go. It tells a story that everyone can appreciate and relate to, which is why it's a big part of every Filipino culture.

The Resiliency of a Filipino is Built into the Culture

 

A little-known fact about Filipinos is that a polite way of greeting someone is to invite them to share your food. When you approach Filipinos while they’re enjoying a meal, they will greet you with a cheery “Kain tayo or Kaon ta,” which translates to “Let’s eat.” Small gestures like this are built into the Filipino culture, one of which is the ironclad habit of helping your neighbours or giving food to those who don’t have it.

But more than generosity and innate friendliness, Filipinos are also some of the most practical people in the world. In the face of hardships, Filipinos are less likely to question why such difficulties could happen but are more likely to accept that bad things do happen. The real question for a Filipino is, what should we do next?

These can be seen during the corona pandemic when so many people lost their jobs. Instead of throwing their hands up, the resilience of the Filipino spirit showed in how most people adapted to their change in circumstances. Whether it’s to sell baked goods online or to learn to buy and sell items via popular eCommerce websites or to find work online, most people in the Philippines looked at what needed to be done and took the next step.

The Resiliency of the Filipino is finding strength in family. There are times when the Filipino culture of having a close-knit family can be a pain, like when your Auntie asks when you’re getting married, something that happens often enough during the holidays. But the great thing about having a close-knit family as most Filipinos do is that there’s always someone to lend you a sympathetic ear and even a helping hand when times get tough.

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What Filipino culture should be stopped?

By: Jean-Marie Valheur

Young, handsome and exceptionally well-endowed

I like to write. All answers I have written, you may copy, you may use any lines you enjoy, you may copy, paste, share, translate, publish at your leisure — just credit me by name, is all. It’s the bare minimum a decent person would do.

Who am I? Just, somebody who likes to write. It’s really not that complicated. I exist, you exist, we all exist. Just briefly. And my brief existence, I dedicate to writing enjoyable little things for no one in particular.

Utang na loob is a pretty toxic belief. The whole ‘owing your relatives something’. Or just owing them the ‘debt of gratitude’. Which seems fine on the surface, but it’s often abused. Say you are your average Filipino family, fairly poor as Filipino families tend to be. You have one auntie in Canada or Dubai. She’s hot shit. She’s super important. She sends boxes home and give gifts to her nephews, nieces, siblings back home. Nice of her, isn’t it?

But no, auntie isn’t really very nice at all. Because some relatives get considerably better gifts then others, some barely get anything at all. Even among cousins the same age, some kids are ‘favorites’ and get brand new roller skates, whereas a ‘less loved’ kid gets only a Toblerone or a large Snickers bar. But auntie is so good, she’s so helpful… you have to worship her like a God.

Oh and auntie is so selfless too! She never married, so she could support her relatives. Never mind that she kind of hates kids and kind of hates men and kind of hates everybody. Never mind that she is hardly marriage material to begin with. No, no, it’s all a ‘noble sacrifice’ from her end. She will side in family conflicts. She will determine the outcome of these conflicts. Which of the nieces or nephews will be supported financially to go through college, the kindest, the smartest, or the one whose parents kissed aunties ass the most?

At times it feels like Filipino families are a bit like Game of Thrones with various ‘factions’ duking it out. People will simultaneously look up to and praise their ‘rich’ foreign relatives, and hate them at the same time for their arrogance. There’s a lot of in-fighting, hidden and not-so-hidden rivalries. And it’s all hidden underneath this cultural veneer of ‘showing how grateful you are’.

As an example… a great-aunt in our family has once helped some of our relatives. Now my wife’s family is expected to be super nice to this great-aunt. People forget, however, that this great-aunt only became successful in the first place because her older sister, wife’s grandmother, paid for her studies in the first place, allowing her to go abroad. Now each year on great-aunties birthday, slavishly devoted relatives make videos of themselves wishing her a ‘long and happy life’, puke-worthy sweet music underneath, holding up posters with her face like she’s a Filipino provincial version of Kim Il-Sung… you know, because of gratitude. Doesn’t work both ways, though, and a lot of it is determined by how popular you end up being inside the family. Older sister later got broke, so her kindness and help in getting younger sister rich and abroad is conveniently forgotten as the rest of the Clan kisses her little sisters ass into perpetuity.

Utang na loob is the single most toxic Filipino cultural aspect I’ve ever seen, and I have stories for days on how it gets abused by some people. There’s so much bitterness, so much awfulness. So much gossip, so much drama. And sometimes this spans two, three, even four generations. The concept of ‘owing one’ to the sister of your grandmother for something she did forty years ago and it allowing her to act like a bitch in the year 2020 is ridiculous.