by OPI
Dr. Nimfa Bracamonte, faculty of the Sociology Department of the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) earned an Excellent Paper Citation award from the 2011 International Conference on Humanities, Society, and Culture in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Bracamonte’s paper entitled “From the Seas to the Streets: The Bajau in Diaspora in the Philippines,” which she co-authored with Astrid S. Boza and Teresita S. Poblete, tackled the scattering of the sea-dwelling Bajau after having been uprooted from their home base in the Sulu Archipelago. The tribe’s loss of the traditional mode of earning their living has consequently forced them to begging. The paper also discussed the current initiatives taken by individuals to help the Bajaus.
Bracamonte was part of a team of five faculty members of the CASS who presented their papers in the conference at the plush Lanson Place Ambassador Row Residences on November 4 to 6.
Joining Bracamonte were Ms. Honeylet E. Dumoran, Mr. Amado C. Guinto, Jr., Prof. Jean Graciela E. Penola, and Prof. Rabindranath S. Polito, all of the English Department, who delivered papers before an audience representing about 20 countries in the conference co-sponsored by the International Economics Development and Research Center (IEDRC).
In the field of Sociolinguistics, Dumoran and Polito presented their studies entitled “Translating Culture: A Case of Re-Affirming Identity in the Translation of Films” and “Language and Power in Blogging: A Critical Discourse Analysis,” respectively.
Dumoran analyzed the treatment of voiced-over, subtitled, and dubbed audio-visual materials in the Philippine context, providing insights on the relationship between translation norms and the recipient culture. The norms were identified in a study done on three audio-visual materials, representative of the three modes of audio-visual translation. She deduced that the translated audio-visual text also conveys the socio-cultural identity of the recipient culture that shapes this text’s translation, in addition to conveying its own creative purpose.
Polito revealed the results of his in-depth linguistic analysis of 40 blogs of freshman students of this Institute using the three Critical Discourse Analysis methods, namely: transitivity, presuppositions, and deixis. He expounded that languages encode, shape, and maintain ideology in society proving the assertion that language and power always go together. Furthermore, he emphasized that Filipinos have maintained the ideology on power instilled by the colonizers, resulting in de-ethnicization, cultural immersion, and hybrid identity.
Guinto and Penola presented papers in the fields of Literary Criticism and Theater Studies.
Guinto, in his paper entitled “Distillation of Bantugan: A Maranao Epic,” studied and analyzed the hero Bantugan’s character in the epic Darangen. His Postmodern analysis used deconstruction, psychoanalysis, folklore theories, and “distillation” – a term coined by Steven Patrick C. Fernandez to encompass the whole transcreation process of a source material (here, the epic) to a scenario of a theater production. Guinto “distilled” the text of a chapter of the epic to a theater script outline that drew out meanings and affective values of folk literature.
Penola’s study identified and analyzed the theatrical devices — the sets and props — employed in three one-act plays of Fernandez. Aptly titling her study “Shaping and Re-Shaping Fernandez’s Women Characters Through Domestic Fixtures,” Penola analyzed the symbolism in the theatrical devices used that deepened the meanings in the images of the women characters in the plays. She concluded that the domestic fixtures have magnified the dominant traits of the characters and have profoundly filtered into the dramatic spectacle, thus becoming an essential component in the shaping and re-shaping of the women characters.
The five papers now appear in the 20th Volume of a Thomson ISI-indexed “International Proceedings of Economics Development and Research: Humanities, Society and Culture” edited by Dong Lijuan, and published and distributed worldwide by the International Association of Computer Science and Information Technology (IACSIT) Press.
