‘Gunita’: Spirituality, Memory, and Socio-Ecological Change in Post-Disaster Infanta, Philippines

Every November, women at St. Mark Cathedral offer prayers for those who perished in the 2004 flash flood and seek forgiveness for the destruction of the mountains that led to the disaster in Infanta, a rural town southwest of Metro Manila. Twenty years later, remnants of the flash flood seem to have faded: the forests have regrown, the town’s economy is thriving, and public institutions acknowledge the lessons of history. What role have spiritual beliefs—from animistic traditions to organized religion—played in the profound transformations of these once socially and ecologically vulnerable communities? While spirituality is increasingly recognized as a coping mechanism, its connection to remembrance and its impact on long-term social-ecological change is less understood. A video documentary production on Infanta’s twenty-year journey since 2004 has provided an opportunity for the researchers cum documentarists to understand the role of spiritual beliefs and remembrance in resilience and renewal. Recently, local government officials, religious institutions, and local communities have come together to protest a multi-million dollar dam project, effectively weaving spirituality and collective memory of the 2004 flash flood into the narrative. In the 1754 Tagalog dictionary Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala (Noceda and Sanlucar), the local construct ‘gunita’/‘golita’ (loosely translated as ‘memory’) is defined as “to remember something to bury.” Using local, storytelling-based research methods as well as ethnovideography, this study seeks to expand the sociological understanding of ‘gunita’/‘golita’ in the context of personal and institutional forms of remembering that seem to challenge Western social science categories and dichotomies (e.g., church-state, religion-indigenous belief systems, objectivist-subjectivist perspectives in resilience studies). In the end, the paper argues that spirituality and collective memory shape social actions with critical implications to long-term social-ecological transformation.