Exploring the Signs and Objects in Aswang Accounts and Descriptions in Academic Texts: A Semiotic and Critical Interpretation

Abstract

Aswang narratives have vigorously permeated online spaces of intellectual discourse, such as books, journal articles, and films, a testament that this indigenous folklore is a cultural capital vividly establishing its position in the literature, preserved for the Filipino heritage and traditional knowledge to live on. I performed a critical reading of 28 articles on aswang and utilised Peircean semiotics as a lens through which aswang significations are captured in my interpretation. Seven striking themes that stand for something bigger (signs) emerged in my reading, with their possible interpretations (objects). First, both old and current aswang articles have predominantly described typologies, classifications, or categories of aswang, which had resulted in aswang’s multifaceted nature signifying the continuity of the myth. Second, Filipina shamans and priestesses during the Spanish colonisation, who had been heavily maligned and demonised, along with aswang appearing prevalently as a monstrous female, signifies oppression, subversion, and Othering of women in an unabatingly patriarchal society. Third, the ubiquity of aswang as a symbol of invasion, manipulation, and colonisation suggests a call to awareness and discernment as a way of breaking the contorted belief that it exists if in reality it does not, as well as imploring the Filipino people to see the “real” aswang right in front of their eyes. Believing in the myth and perpetuating this belief appears to be a social ill, suggesting delusion, self-deception, and an unfortunate acceptance of ignorance or enslavement by a distorted logic. Moreover, the ominous and appalling audibility of sounds and soundscapes in aswang descriptions, along with their gruesome images, suggests that aswang is a metaphor for an abusive, dysfunctional, deviant, perverted, and corrupt society in which we live and the perpetuation of abuse of power. However, descriptions in current literature have displayed aswang’s shapeshifting, hybrid, liminal, and transcendent nature (i.e., the traditional aswang as a blood-sucking female creature versus modern-day aswang as blood-hungry dominant men in politics and power), urging us to believe that we can reinvent our logic and imagination by carefully noticing our very reality rather than dwelling on the myth. Both in its folkloric understanding and transcendent nature, aswang emerges to be a symbol of fear, anxiety, intimidation, terror, and trauma, illustrating the destructive nature of aswang embodied by a subtle but insidious hegemonic power in an increasingly dysfunctional Philippine society. Nonetheless, despite the horrors of aswang symbolised by colonialism and trauma, there remains the courage of the Filipino to arrest such painful experiences in memory by continuing the act of remembering. This is possibly because, as a people, they are drawn to revisit distant pain and grief despite how aswang has vehemently destroyed their very consciousness. The Filipino people somehow dwell with distant pain and suffering rather than forget, because dwelling with pain is their way of healing.