At the St. Louis World’s Fair, the Philippine Exposition made the case that the Philippines needed the United States. The US had recently taken control of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War.

The transition was violent and contested. As the US was borne out of an anti-imperialist sentiment, there was a need to make sense of it at home. The exposition offered an answer framed through the language of the White Man’s Burden and what American officials called benevolent assimilation.

Visitors walked through reconstructed villages where people from the Philippines carried out everyday activities. They cooked, built houses, performed rituals, and moved through routines under constant observation. They participated in a staged argument.

On one side were the performances of the Philippine Constabulary Band, composed of lowland Christianized Filipinos. They wore uniforms, played structured compositions, and followed a conductor with precision. Their bandleader, an African American (Walter Howard Loving), added another component to the display, showing how the United States positioned itself as capable of organizing colonial subjects within a broader imperial order.

Elsewhere in the exposition, several Philippine communities, including the Igorots, were presented in ways that emphasized difference. Visitors were encouraged to watch practices framed as unusual or unfamiliar, including the consumption of dog meat and ritual activities detached from their social contexts. These were not presented as part of a coherent system of knowledge.

They were isolated to produce contrast. On one side was discipline, order, and something recognizable to American audiences. On the other was a portrayal of distance from that order.

The juxtaposition suggested movement from one to the other, with the United States positioned as the guide. This is particularly significant in the Cordillera, a region where Spanish administration had never fully taken hold. The exposition reframed that history.

Instead of highlighting autonomy, it presented the region as a space waiting to be brought into a broader system. For many Americans, this was their first sustained encounter with the Philippines. What they encountered was not the Philippines as lived.

It was a version arranged for interpretation. Visitors left with the impression that people from the Philippines needed help to advance, that they were not ready for self-rule, and that the US presence would bring education and progress. Responsibility and control were made to look the same.

These impressions were produced through spatial arrangement and performance. The Philippines entered the American imagination through a framework that made hierarchy appear natural. That framework did not end in 1904.

Anthropology has played a role in shaping and sustaining it. That history calls for a reckoning within the discipline. If that is the case, then it is worth revisiting what anthropology claims to be.

At its core, anthropology is about people. We even call them interlocutors, which is a long way of saying we are supposed to be in conversation with them, not simply writing about them. The history of the field tells a different story.

People were studied, categorized, and written into narratives that often left them out of the conversation. We like to think those days are behind us. But the habits linger.

Sometimes as knowledge production. Sometimes as a preference for staying within academic circles. It is easier that way.

You get your degree. You get your tenure. You publish. You build a career from knowledge that came from somewhere, often from people who trusted you with their time and experience.

At the end of it, there might be a thank you in the acknowledgments. But engagement is harder. It takes time. It can be uncomfortable.

It means being accountable to the people we work with. It requires listening, adjusting, and occasionally admitting that we got things wrong. It also requires stepping outside the inward-looking habits that can make scholarship appear inclusive while remaining closed in practice.

Engagement, in this context, goes beyond outreach and asks for a two-way process grounded in time, trust, and shared effort, and, when taken seriously, it produces outcomes that extend beyond publications. The Ifugao Indigenous Peoples Education (IPED) Center is one example. It did not emerge from a single project or individual but from years of conversations, fieldwork, negotiations, and shared meals, where ideas moved between stories and practice, sometimes over Red Horse and bayah, and I can confirm par