Rumors, Panic, and Disasters:
The Experience of Candelaria Town in Quezon Province, Philippines, 1934 and 2014
Kerby Alvarez
Assistant Professor
University of the Philippines Diliman
The history of disasters has been an exponentially growing research field in the social sciences in the Philippines. In particular, the field of Philippine environmental history is regarded as an overarching framework in local, regional, and national history writing.
In times of disasters, rumors are one of the prime instigators of fear and panic to people. Whether in everyday life situations or cases of emergencies, rumors cause massive disruptions in the normative state, and orderly thinking and response of the people. And in many cases, panic experiences are unnoticeably repeated or unconsciously become part of a cycle of events where people are rendered helpless. The panic and stress instigated by these rumors hamper the proactive way of responding to the dangers of situations caused by natural hazards. A study of these rumors provides an avenue where the complex interplay of local culture, scientific knowledge, and people’s vulnerability can be viewed, mainly through how rumors dictate people’s actions and views towards natural hazards. The mass hysteria of Filipinos concerning typhoons, for example, has a surmountable influence on the way they view and respond to such environmental threats. This “cultural trait” of spreading and absorbing rumors, though maybe labeled as a product of collective panic, was once described in the 1930s by Jesuit scientist Miguel Selga as tifonitis or the “mass state of fear of people in the archipelago due to the frequency or extraordinary intensity of typhoons.”[1]
This paper is a case study of how Filipinos perceive natural hazards in a local-traditional and scientific manner. It will examine the case of the Candelaria town in the province of Tayabas (presently Quezon Province), wherein incidents of massive panic happened twice, eighty years apart, in 1934 and 2014. These events have similarities and portray a continuity of people’s cultural consciousness towards disasters. A comparative diachronic analysis of the two events sheds light to the complicated conjectures of local knowledge and scientific norms and illustrates an image of Filipino vulnerability in times of disasters.
[1] Greg Bankoff, “Storms in History: Water, hazard and society in the Philippines, 1565-1930”, Peter Boomgaard (ed.), A World of Water: Rain, rivers, and seas in Southeast Asian histories, Singapore, National University of Singapore Press, 2007, p. 179.