ARI Working Paper Series

The Philippine state’s ability to rationalize its deployment of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) has relied on its endorsement of ‘sacrifice’ as the positive ethic that undergirds an idiom of modern-day heroism. In this paper I seek to add some ethnographic substance to this idiom by making two related analytical movements. Firstly, I discuss how the interests of the Philippine state and the Roman Catholic Church converge towards the perpetuation of an ‘economy of sacrifice,’ which is an ethos of labor deployment premised upon a rhetorical conflation of patriotic virtue and Christ-like martyrdom. Secondly, I draw upon 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork on Roman Catholic Passion rituals in the Philippines in focusing on two forms of embodied labor power that operationalize and sustain the economy of sacrifice: (1) OFW bodies as “export-quality sufferers” – transnational agents who have been trained to externalize certain ethical and corporeal disciplines as forms of export capital and (2) the self-mortifying OFW body who is able to craft and sustain transnational agency through a re-negotiation of the soteriological promise of Christian salvation.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published as part of a published volume: ‘Export-quality martyrs: Roman catholicism and transnational labor in the Philippines’, Journal Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 30, Issue 3, August 2015, pp 424-447.