Pinoy heritage: The Rizal Shrine in Dapitan City is located on the site where Jose Rizal was exiled. According to the writer, there are pieces of Dapitan in Dresden. — Facebook
ANALYN Salvador-Amores, professor of anthropology at the University of the Philippines Baguio, may not fit the image of the swashbuckling anthropologist Indiana Jones, but her work is real, not reel. For many years now, Amores like other Filipino anthropologists and historians, has been on the hunt in German and American museums for artifacts from the Cordilleras.
It is not well known that museums abroad have collections from the Philippines collected as early as the 19th century, that are not exhibited in museums but lie peacefully in storage waiting for Filipino scholars to find and learn from them.
When I first started doing archival research in the 1980s, I realised that many Filipino scholars had to go abroad to consult the primary source, historical documents, and artifacts for their work.
In my time, one could request photocopies – boxes and boxes of them – but in Jose Rizal’s time, without a smartphone or a photocopier, one had to read and retain as much in one’s head as possible, and to do that, he had to copy out, by hand, whole texts.
He did so in the British Museum in 1888, copying one of two early editions of Antonio de Morga’s “Sucesos de las islas Filipinas” or “Events in the Philippine Islands” (Mexico, 1609).
Rizal then annotated the text for the readers of his time and published his edition in Paris in 1890. He was so engrossed in his historical work, he only made one passing reference in one of his letters about the Jack the Ripper murders that occurred from Aug 31 to Nov 9, 1888. Incidentally, I once saw Rizal included on a website that listed all the suspects in the Jack the Ripper murders.
Unlike Rizal, Amores conducts her research with 21st-century technology. Using archival research for her monograph on 19th-century German travellers who collected artifacts from the Cordilleras, she is able to provide provenance, documenting a sequence of ownership that connects museum artifacts abroad to their places of origin.
Then, with cooperation from institutions abroad, like the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology and the university’s “Recollect/Reconnect” initiative, digital repatriation is possible.
I was lucky to get a chance to visit the Berlin Ethnographic Museum and the Ethnology Department of the Dresden Museum to see the artifacts donated by Jose Rizal.
The Berlin collection dates to 1888, when Rizal was busy annotating “Sucesos de las islas Filipinas.” The Dresden collection dates from his exile in Dapitan from 1892 to 1896.
Aside from ethnographic objects, Rizal collected and sent to Dresden: sea shells, fish, reptiles, butterflies, and other insects from Dapitan that have not yet been looked into.
I am not a natural scientist, but I can imagine how important these specimens are in a historical study of Philippine biodiversity. How many of these specimens are found only in Dapitan? How many are extant or extinct?
These museums are very open to Filipinos who carry with them local and specialised knowledge that contributes to their existing database.
Thanks to our participation in the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair, Amores, documentary filmmaker Jay Ignacio, and I were welcomed into the off-site storage of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt by curator Vanessa von Gliszczynski. We all felt like children let loose in a candy store. A small selection of objects was prepared on a table for us to see.
These included a very distinctive “bulul” or granary god of Philippine hardwood that I felt would not feel out of place in a tasteful home ornamented with Philippine modern art. There were two wooden Kalinga shields whose stylised representation we see on the seal of the Philippine National Police, in the wrong inverted position.
There were some very finely made lowland Christian hats, some kris (wavy blade).
The objects on the table were like mere appetisers for a full-course meal with many more items in the storage cabinets that were open and waiting.
I could not help but think as International Archaeology Day passed yesterday, Oct 18, how one day, Filipino scholars will locate and identify all of these. Each cabinet, each drawer a time capsule into the Philippine past. — Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN
Ambeth R. Ocampo is a Filipino historian.
