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here are threads that undoubtedly bind us, but we Southeast Asians are accurately described as pluricultural and multi-ethnic. We have lived thus for several centuries now and most of the histories of the nations that constitute our part of the globe bear the marks of attempts of various colonizers to deal with ethnicity and to make us more “manageable” by bringing us Islam first, then Christianity—though in various forms as well, and attempting to cope with the Babel of our many languages through some imposed common medium—in the case of the Philippines, Spanish, marginally, and English, considerably! This brings me to my first question: Have we lived amidst walls “already there”? And was it the colonizers’ “manifest destiny” to tear down these walls? Or did they in fact build walls? I stand by the position that in our part of the world, we live with walls that have already been there, walls that, in Levinas’ own peculiar but powerfully suggestive terms, are an-archic, in the sense that they are an-arche, older than any design and predating any prescription. The fact for us Filipinos seems to be that we have lived with walls and we are not attributing these walls to our colonizers alone. We recognized our mountain regions as walls where dwelt tribes with customs and practices of their own—including, for some time in the past, the dreaded show of machismo that took the form of head-hunting. We recognized our southern provinces as walled by the religion, the culture and the aspirations of Islam. Walls then have been a fact of national existence, and wherever positive law has attempted to tear down these walls, we have had more trouble than gain. This of course makes us ask whether these are indeed “walls”—although it is clear that in other parts of the world, they have been walls. Isn’t “walls as a problem” ethnocentric in motive? To ask when a “wall” is a “wall” is to ask about the architectonics of power, if Foucault is not terribly wrong. What counts as a wall? Is a different language a wall? Is a different religion a wall? Obviously when the Spaniards made the Philippines a colony of Spain they counted as a wall the Catholic faith

To Build or to Destroy? The Philippine Experience with Walls and a Southeast Asian Perspective