View from Below, Part 2

1898 US Political Cartoon. US President William McKinley is shown holding the Philippines, depicted as a savage child, as the world looks on.

My father used to teach me a song about the Aetas, which he himself had learned as a schoolboy. It starts: “Negritos of the mountains, what kind of food do you eat?…”. I still know the tune but could never remember how it ended because these lines would play over and over in my head like a needle stuck in a groove. For a while it made me believe that the Aetas were indeed Africans, and pygmies moreover, from the Spanish diminutive -ito suffixed to Negro. The song itself, I suspect, comes from an elementary civics class from a public school system established by the Americans that had educated both my parents and grandparents. It would not be surprising that Americans would appropriate such racially derogatory term, considering how Filipinos were portrayed as black savages in editorial cartoons during the Philippine-American War, how indigenous tribes were hauled like spoils and paraded to the public in the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, and also given the history of slavery and segregation in the South. The question itself, posed innocuously in a children’s song, serves to exoticize the Aetas. They are represented as radically other, like animals in tropical forests, hidden from and inaccessible to civilization, whose diet (what strange fruits?) becomes a curious object of scientific study.

 

Air and Fire, Earth under Water

Priestly Medalists, from left: Paul Flory (1974), Linus Pauling (1984), and Gabor Somorjai (2008 )

Every other year, the American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting includes a Tribology Symposium under the Colloids and Interfaces division. This year, the meeting was held in New Orleans, and I was able to participate by presenting our research on the conformational origins of polymer brush lubrication. The Priestly Medal went to Gabor Somorjai for his contributions to surface science and catalysis. He essentially established the field here in the US, popularly being referred to as the “father of modern surface chemistry”. I keep a copy if his Chemistry in Two Dimensions: Surfaces (1981), based on his lectures at Cornell, handy on my office bookshelf. Our research group traces its lineage to his group at UC Berkeley, where my professor spent his postdoc years. We now employ the ultra-high vacuum (UHV) techniques of surface anayses and scanning probe microscopies (SPM) to study tribological phenomena. I was therefore excited to listen to his talk, and did not miss the chance to take a photo with him. It was a little bit odd being somewhat of a scientist’s groupie, but Somorjai–a huge bear of a Hungarian–was surprisingly warm and winsome. He then awkwardly excused himself for his autograph-signing appointment.