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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. This book examines the extraordinary flowering of scholarly writing about the peoples and history of the Philippines, written by young Filipinos in the years preceding the Philippine Revolution. It seeks to explain how young colonial subjects could produce such scholarship, what appeal these scholarly pursuits held for them, and what political significance the writings had for their contemporaries. These writings show that the political meanings of scholarly and intellectual traditions are shaped by their content and methods, though not wholly determined by them. These young Filipinos drew on a set of scholarly practices—linguistics (philology), folklore, ethnology—that were part of European Orientalism and nineteenth-century racial sciences and, in turn, associated with European colonial pretensions.

The heuristic value of Primo Levi's approach to living and writing is evident by the different ways scholars in various disciplines are using his writings. This bibliography on the scholarly writings about Primo Levi analyzes him in a substantial way within a comparative framework. Some studies have not been included because they only touch upon Levi, deriving inspiration from his work but placing the main focus elsewhere. The bibliography includes listings of material published through the summer of 2010. It is organized into five thematic sections. The last three are closely related because the interconnectedness of Levi's life and work, fiction and nonfiction, makes the placing of a citation in one section as opposed to another, at times, an arbitrary exercise.

This chapter returns to some salient points of comparison between scholarly writings on the history of Spanish colonization in the Philippines and similar scholarly projects produced in other parts of the world in which colonial or imperial rule was being contested. In comparison with scholarly efforts in British South Asia, in German-speaking Europe, and along Europe’s western and eastern peripheries, this scholarship of the Philippines is in some respects exceptional. However, we find that elsewhere, too, the Orientalist and anthropological projects of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only condoned forms of colonialism but could be used to challenge them. They were the languages through which peoples and nations could be articulated.

This chapter traces the sometimes conflicting political histories and significance of Orientalism’s methodological and thematic qualities as well as those of the related and younger anthropological sciences. Orientalism and the anthropological sciences employed methods, tropes, and themes whose particular features made them more or less available and useful to Filipino intellectuals. In order to better understand the specificities and significance of the Filipino case, the chapter begins by identifying the special significance that India has held in Orientalist (and subsequently postcolonial) scholarship, noting features of the Indian case that make it unique rather than a generalizable model. It then turns to Orientalism’s tools and presumptions. Two specific features of Orientalism are significant both in European Orientalist studies and for subsequent Indian and Filipino political-intellectual projects: first, Orientalism’s focus on authoritative texts; and second, its narrative of historical decline from ancient greatness. The chapter ends by describing some of the peculiarities of the late nineteenth-century scholarly world of the Philippines: its higher educational institutions, the unusual contours of Spanish Orientalism, and the dearth of Spanish scholarship about the Philippine islands and peoples. Throughout the chapter, scholarship about and of India appears as a point of comparison.