Who is Dr Zeus Salazar?

Answer 1

Zeus A. Salazar, is a historian, an anthropologist and the proponent of the Pantayong Pananaw.

In 1955, he finished Batsilyer ng Sining sa Kasaysayan, graduating as a summa cum laude from UP Diliman. He obtain his graduate degree from Sorbonne University in Paris where he was awarded with "highest distinction."

He was former chairperson of the University of the Philippines-Diliman Department of History (1987-1989) and a former dean of the university's College of Social Sciences and Philosophy (1989-1992). He obtained his bachelor's degree in history, summa cum laude, from the University of the Philippines in 1955 and finished his doctoral studies in ethnology at Universite de Paris (1968). Salazar is fluent in different languages, among them, Spanish, French, German, Russian and Bahasa Melayu.

He is considered one of the most illustrious historians to follow the great nationalist historians Teodoro A. Agoncillo and Renato Constantino. His conceptual framework of Pantayong Pananaw in Philippine social science refreshened the nationalist perspective that lost its luster after the Marcos years. Pantayong Pananaw has provided a powerful framework for a new generation of Philippine scholars in writing the history and culture of the Filipino "inert masses."

According to Ricamela Palis, Salazar in his many papers posited that:

"the history of a specific community or nation should be construed primarily on the basis of the internal flow of its own history. Colonized for centuries by foreign powers, (Filipino) worldview is largely influenced by the works of scholars under the tutelage of colonial education. Philippine history, therefore, may be construed based on our own understanding of concepts and constructs that spring from two perspectives-first, from the likas o taal na Pilipino; and second, from the Western worldview."

With the arrival of Western colonizers, Philippine "historiography was framed in Western language and ideology," a bias that has been continued for several generations of Philippine historians. Salazar devoted many of his writings to redress this imbalance of Filipino self-representation and discourse. His analysis affected many of the approaches to writing social sciences, especially psychology. For example, he enumerated the four traditions upon which Philippine psychology was rooted, as follows: