Sacrificial Bodies

Sacrificial Bodies is a comprehensive study on how the act of heroic sacrifice against foreign aggression has been transformed into a means of liberating generations of Filipinos from all forms of oppression, through the iconic pose and location of Guillermo Tolentino’s sculpture, the Oblation, within the University of the Philippines (UP) campus. The book chronicles the ideas, philosophies, and genealogy of this statue from the turn of the century to the present, combining approaches in anthropology, art history, political science, and literary theory in fleshing out the various meanings and implications of this pose. Irrevocably tied to the student body and faculty of UP, the Oblation’s sacrificial symbolism was also meant to cover a national audience, and teach us how to redeem ourselves by undertaking the same process of suffering, death, and resurrection that its primary model, the Passion of Christ, imprinted upon the cultural memory of colonial-era Filipinos. By tracing this idea through the various icons and images of the Oblation, the book also reveals how ambivalent and context-specific this assertion has been ingrained, imagined, and re-experienced by generations of practitioners in Philippine visual culture.